Hugh MacDiarmid Andrew Marr's Great Scots: The Writers Who Shaped a Nation


Hugh MacDiarmid

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The Union between Scotland and England is 307 years old.

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And for most of those years, the best of Scotland's writers,

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poets, novelists, and journalists have struggled to understand

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the Union and even at times have tried to change its nature.

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However, that Union may be about to end.

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On September the 18th, Scotland votes on the independence referendum.

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Now, the polls have gone up and down and wafted all over the place,

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but hundreds of thousands of Scots have kept their views

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firmly to themselves, and therefore, it is at least possible

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that on that date, Scotland will vote "Yes".

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A few times lately, when he's been particularly hepped up,

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Alex Salmond has reached into the rattle bag of Scottish poetry

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to find words equal to the occasion.

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And he has pulled out, not Robert Burns, but somebody else entirely.

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Now let me leave you with a quote from Hugh MacDiarmid.

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"We have faith in Scotland's hidden powers -

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"the present's theirs, but the past and the future is ours."

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Now, I know that Hugh MacDiarmid isn't exactly a household name -

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though I've always loved his poetry. I studied it at university,

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which is the kind of strange thing students do.

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I soon discovered that Hugh MacDiarmid was just a pen name.

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The man was really called Christopher Murray Grieve.

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I read and adored his great epic poem,

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A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle,

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and it soon became clear he devoted his entire life

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to the causes of communism and Scottish Independence.

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England still thinks it is a world influence and a world mission

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and so on. Let's get rid of England somehow or other.

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Completely.

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Could it possibly be that Hugh MacDiarmid -

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a man who hated the English, flirted with fascism,

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and greatly admired Joseph Stalin,

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could have anything to do with modern Scottish nationalism?

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It's sleepy now, the Border town of Langholm,

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birthplace of Scotland's most bothersome poet -

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but it wasn't when he was born here,

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to the local postman and his wife, in 1892.

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Weaving was the town's daily bread.

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The people in the Border towns when I was a boy were very radical,

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and they all shared this frontier feeling of difference

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from the English and in fact, animosity to them.

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The old Border tradition of raids and reivers and so on,

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and I seized on these things very early.

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The Grieve family lived in rooms below the town library,

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and the young Christopher Murray Grieve read everything it contained.

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He joined the Independent Labour Party when he was just 16.

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He worked as a journalist for local newspapers

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and in 1915, he went to war.

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The Scots were a fighting people - they made up a tenth

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of the British population, and a fifth of British casualties.

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After the Armistice of 1918, the survivors trickled slowly back

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to Scotland by ones and twos.

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And tens and thousands demobilised.

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Grieve had spent the war on the bitter sideshow

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of the Eastern Front, the war in Greece and Turkey

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with the Ottoman Empire.

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And while he was there, he'd slowly built up a head of steam.

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A simmering resentment of the condescending, patronising attitudes

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of the English officer class.

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The Welsh soldiers, the Irish and the Scots, he'd later say,

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had a natural comradeship which the English officers

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could not understand, never mind share.

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Grieve had resented the English well before the war,

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but during it, his loathing of the officer classes

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curdled into a loathing of the English generally,

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and their assumption that the Union was theirs, as of right, to lead,

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and Scotland, some kind of diddly afterthought.

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Grieve hated them.

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Hating was the first of his talents and the worst of his vices.

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When he got back to Britain in 1919,

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everything he wanted for Scotland was happening across the Irish Sea.

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Ireland was fighting for her independence,

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and there was a lesson that Grieve could learn from the Irish conflict.

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By 1919, the guns were drawn, and the grenades were flying.

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But he was very well aware that Ireland's independence battles

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had begun with her writers.

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As the 19th century ended,

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William Butler Yeats and JM Synge had explored, and restored,

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Ireland's sense of herself -

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her Celtic history, her God-bothered present.

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Younger writers like Sean O'Casey went further -

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political change was what they wanted, violently if necessary.

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Chris Grieve wanted exactly that for Scotland.

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And like O'Casey, he wanted communism, too.

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He wanted a Scottish Communist Republic, and to get there,

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he needed a new kind of Scottish writing

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sharpened and refashioned as a weapon.

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He wanted a Scottish literary renaissance.

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And that renaissance would begin here - in a little market town,

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a bit south of Aberdeen. Montrose.

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This is the sort of place you might have found him

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in the early 1920s.

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Taking an interest in the price of cattle, tups and tractors.

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He was the only journalist working for the Montrose Review -

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a little newspaper, full of farming news, church announcements,

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deaths and births.

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A married man needs a day job,

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especially when he has a secret agenda -

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the tearing apart of the United Kingdom.

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And if you look closely, it becomes more interesting -

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Grieve was a town councillor, a parish councillor, a JP,

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pursuing surprisingly left-wing ends.

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A bar-room Bolshevik, a parish-council communist.

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In whatever spare time he could find, he thought, and he wrote

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at the home he shared with his wife Peggy - a council house,

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number 16, Links Avenue, Montrose.

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There, he laid his plans for the Scottish Renaissance.

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There was a great deal of work to do, because by the 1920s,

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Scottish culture had come to mean something like this.

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# I love a lassie, a bonnie Hieland lassie

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# If you saw her, you would fancy her as well... #

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Ever since the Union, Scottish literature had been in decline.

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Once a year, Scots at home and abroad warmed their hands

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at the immortal memory of Scotland's national Bard, Robert Burns.

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But Burns had been the last gasp of great serious writing in Scots.

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After Burns, Walter Scott had laid down the facts

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in his fictions of Scottish history.

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In Scott, the Scottish characters speak Scots -

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the narrator, the man in charge, speaks English.

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By the 1920s, the Scottish language had been demoted

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to little more than comic local colour.

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And the man who embodied this more than anything else,

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a kind of three-dimensional living cliche of Scottishness,

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was somebody that Chris Grieve detested.

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Harry Lauder.

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Immensely popular in both England and Scotland, on stage and off,

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kilted, sporraned, and bonneted,

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Lauder played the stereotypical Scot.

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Unionist to the core,

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his stage banter bristled with hackneyed Scottish sayings.

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"It's a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht, mercy me!

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"Lang may yer lums reek!"

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And the behaviour onstage was just as hackneyed.

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Lauder spent a lot of time pretending to be drunk.

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# Roaming in the gloaming with a lassie by my side... #

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For Christopher Grieve, this was the Scot who had devoted his life

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to making Scottishness itself a figure of fun.

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I've always been an intellectual.

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That may be disputed, but I don't think it's disputable.

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And...

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I was opposed to certain ideas that were current at that time,

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promulgated by the Burns... Club Of London.

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Other bodies.

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And I knew what they wanted - they wanted

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a continuation of the Harry Lauder Scottish comic sort of thing,

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and I decided, in consonance with my own character,

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to take a very different angle of approach.

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Grieve was trying to reclaim two things from Harry Lauder,

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from Walter Scott, and from the miserably reduced figure

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of Robert Burns, the sanctified National Bard,

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whose actual words no longer seemed to matter more than once a year.

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He wanted to reclaim Scots itself as a language for serious writing,

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and he wanted to reclaim the very idea of the Scotsman.

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The kilt and tartan were obviously the wardrobe of the stereotype,

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but on the other hand, you didn't see English people walking about in kilts.

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And making things as Scottish as possible was what Grieve was up to.

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And so he invented a poet.

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A very Scottish poet - a poet who could not be, like Grieve himself,

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a Lowlander, coming from a little town just eight or nine miles away from the English Border.

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But a Highland poet, the kind of poet you might see in a kilt,

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and sporran, and a lovat jacket.

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A poet with a proper Highland name - Hugh MacDiarmid.

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Grieve invented a new kind of Scots, as well.

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He looked through a recent history of Lowland Scots dialect,

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and a massive 19th century dictionary of the Scots language,

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quarrying words out from every part of Scotland,

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seeking, always, words as different as possible from the English.

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And he called the result, with commendable honesty,

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"synthetic Scots".

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And for some time, Hugh MacDiarmid would write only in this new,

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more colourful, richer, more pungent Scots,

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and for several years he tried very hard to persuade his readers

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that Chris Grieve and Hugh MacDiarmid were two completely separate people.

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(Funny how you never see them together.)

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So far, so funny - but comedy wasn't the point.

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The first new Scots poem he wrote was The Watergaw -

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"the rainbow" - a memory of his father's death.

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A crazed look that had come across his father's face

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in his last moments, blended with another memory -

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a rainbow in midsummer, seen through a storm of wind and rain.

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Ae weet forenicht I' the yow-trummle

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I saw yon antrin thing

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A watergaw wi' its chitterin licht

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Ayont the on-ding

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An I thocht o' the last wild look ye gied

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Afore ye deed!

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There was nae reek I' the laverock's hoose that nicht

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an nane I' mine

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But I hae thocht o' that foolish licht

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Ever sin syne

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An' I think that mebbe at last I ken

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What your look meant then.

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The Watergaw is a wonderful little poem.

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And yes, it could be translated into English,

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but that required many more words and produced something

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that didn't have the original's force and pungency and special magic.

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And what that showed was that Scots was a tongue which could express

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different ways of seeing, than thinking, than English

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and was valuable in its own right.

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This was the beginning of the Scottish literary renaissance.

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Out of the ground, a long-buried tradition was starting to slither

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and emerge into the daylight.

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Meanwhile...

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Hugh MacDiarmid's special friend, the one you never saw him with,

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the one who looked exactly like him, edited magazines

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which he printed at the presses of the Montrose Review just behind me -

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by kind permission of the owner.

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And in these magazines -

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The Scottish Nation, The Scottish Chapbook -

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you would find poems by Hugh MacDiarmid,

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prose articles by Hugh MacDiarmid, editorials by Hugh MacDiarmid,

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all on a very high-minded literary theme.

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Reflections On Burns And Burns Suppers,

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A Celebration Of Jamieson's Etymological Dictionary Of The Scottish Tongue,

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and, perhaps, A Programme For Scottish Fascism!

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It seems shocking now, but that's NOW.

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As far as anyone could see in 1923,

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Mussolini's antics in Italy were no more than a mix of patriotism,

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socialism and theatricality.

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We know how dark things would get. MacDiarmid simply didn't.

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No-one did.

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These were still very early days and there were huge numbers

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of apologists for fascism, including Irish poets like Yeats,

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and English writers like Percy Wyndham Lewis.

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But to get a Scottish fascism going

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would have required the creation of a Scottish fascist party,

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and that was still absolutely on MacDiarmid's mind.

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In 1924, two more writers - a husband and wife -

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arrived in Montrose,

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and they'd become willing recruits to MacDiarmid's paradise

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of home-made nationalist propaganda.

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Edwin Muir was a well-respected literary critic,

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with poetic ambitions.

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His wife, Willa, was a translator.

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She had family here. They were a sort of literary double act.

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To the Muirs, Montrose was a cultural desert,

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apart from a small oasis at 16, Links Avenue.

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And the friendship was instant.

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The Muirs often visited the Grieves.

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They never knew quite what to expect.

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On one occasion, they found

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Peggy outside the house, very distressed.

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Hugh MacDiarmid had been to a meeting of Montrose farmers

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and become very drunk indeed.

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He'd then gone back and locked himself into the bathroom,

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where he'd gone silent and wouldn't come out.

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What had happened?

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Was Scotland about to lose her great literary hero?

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Now, Edwin Muir was not an athletic man.

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He'd been turned down as "unfit for army service".

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But he knew his patriotic duty

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and he forced his way in through a tiny window,

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into the bathroom, where he found

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the great Hugh MacDiarmid,

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lying, stark naked, in an empty bath.

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The drunk man, asleep with his thistle.

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Muir and MacDiarmid became a double act, as well.

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Edwin Muir - specs, hair carefully combed -

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was the straight man.

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Hugh MacDiarmid, with hair like his ideas,

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boiling off his skull in all directions,

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was the revolutionary - the rebel poet.

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Both of these men were really worried

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that Scotland had not had her own serious mainstream

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literature for more than 100 years.

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They both thought that this had

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psychologically devastated the nation.

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And they both returned to the Irish example.

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If literature was the nation,

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and there was no modern literature, then their duty was clear.

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They just had to roll up their sleeves and create one themselves.

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And so they did, in Montrose,

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birthplace of the Scottish Renaissance.

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Muir's role was as a critic, supporting the publication of

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MacDiarmid's first book in 1925 -

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Sangschaw, or "Songshow", "song festival".

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Muir used his critical connections to place a powerfully

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positive review of Sangschaw not in a British cultural review,

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but an American one.

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International impact was essential to the cause.

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And, in this review, Muir asserted

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that not only was a reimagined and revitalised Scottish literature

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in a reimagined Scots tongue possible,

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it was already fact.

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Sangschaw exploded in all directions.

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Here again was the Watergaw,

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celebrations of sexuality,

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collisions of cosmology and religion,

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the Planet Earth depicted as a "bonnie broukit bairn",

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a "strapping, scruffy child".

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Here was an infinity of Christs born on other, alien worlds.

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Here was the Resurrection

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in this graveyard, Crowdieknowe, near Langholm.

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Oh, to be at Crowdieknowe

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When the last trumpet blaws

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An' see the deid come loupin' owre

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The auld grey wa's.

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Many of MacDiarmid's ancestors lay buried here and

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he imagines them as less than pleased with God for waking them.

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My uncles and other relatives, big, burly, bearded men, and so on,

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and I imagined them rising from these crowded graves

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in a little churchyard, and how they would behave,

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because they were wild men.

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Muckle men wi' tousled beards

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I grat at as a bairn

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'll scramble frae the croodit clay

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Wi' feck o'swearin'.

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An' glower at God an' a'

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His gang o' angels I' the lift

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Thae trashy bleezin' French-like folk

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Wha gar'd them shift!

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So, here it was. A whole volume of serious poetry in Scots.

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MacDiarmid's poems and Muir's reviews generated

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plenty of column inches, but sales weren't great.

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In 1926, Sangschaw sold a total of...

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106 copies.

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MacDiarmid always said that that the raw numbers didn't matter.

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But there were other bad signs, as well.

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In fact, there was absolutely no sign that Scotland was noticing

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MacDiarmid's urgent political message.

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And, in May of 1926,

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the country missed what he regarded as another wonderful opportunity.

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At its height,

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the General Strike of 1926 involved 1.75 million workers,

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both north and south of the Border.

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The establishment feared communist revolution.

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Members of the public were asked to volunteer as blackleg labour

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for essential industries.

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In Montrose, MacDiarmid threw himself into the grassroots

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organisation of the strike.

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But the revolution failed to materialise.

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The strike was over in just ten days.

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MacDiarmid's bitter disappointment was at least part of the inspiration

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for what would become his most famous work,

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A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle.

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The poem was set in his home town of Langholm.

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There's an annual ceremony, called the Common Riding,

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designed to enable the people to assert their rights to certain

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ancient privileges they had on the moors and hills.

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And the programme ends with dancing in the marketplace,

0:22:200:22:23

which I commemorate in this poem.

0:22:230:22:26

Drums in the Walligate, pipes in the air

0:22:260:22:29

Come and hear the cryin o the Fair

0:22:290:22:31

Aa as it used to be, when I was a loon

0:22:310:22:34

On Common-Ridin Day in the Muckle Toon.

0:22:340:22:36

Drums in the Walligate, pipes in the air

0:22:400:22:43

The wallopin thistle is ill to bear.

0:22:430:22:46

MacDiarmid's great poem is absolutely rooted

0:22:460:22:49

here in Langholm and the Scotland he knew.

0:22:490:22:52

But like any great work of modernism,

0:22:520:22:55

it deliberately breaks its own boundaries.

0:22:550:22:58

It breaks the borders of Langholm,

0:22:580:22:59

it breaks the borders of the Borders,

0:22:590:23:02

it breaks the borders of Scotland.

0:23:020:23:04

It embraces French poetry, the Russian poetry of Alexander Blok,

0:23:040:23:08

the thought of the great German philosopher Nietzsche,

0:23:080:23:11

the Russian Revolution, arguments about Christianity and sexuality.

0:23:110:23:15

It is a deliberately difficult poem.

0:23:150:23:18

It's difficult not just because it's in Scots, but because the words,

0:23:180:23:21

and the expressions, and the arguments are themselves

0:23:210:23:24

quite difficult.

0:23:240:23:25

It requires serious, hard work. A lot of brain thought.

0:23:250:23:28

The question is not, is this difficult?

0:23:280:23:30

Does it need a dictionary?

0:23:300:23:32

Yes. You need a dictionary to read Shakespeare, too.

0:23:320:23:35

You need a dictionary to read lots of poets. Ezra Pound, TS Eliot.

0:23:350:23:39

They're all difficult.

0:23:390:23:40

The question is, is this a poem so great, so important

0:23:400:23:44

in its thought, so well expressed, that the difficulty is worth it?

0:23:440:23:47

And the answer is, "Absolutely, yes".

0:23:470:23:51

The poem's written from the viewpoint of a man

0:23:540:23:57

who's watched the thistle borne through Langholm,

0:23:570:23:59

watched the borders of the town being ridden, and then, finally,

0:23:590:24:03

drunkenly, laid down in the heather to think about a Scotland

0:24:030:24:07

that enrages him.

0:24:070:24:08

Scotland is compared, at one point, to a patch of dried semen.

0:24:100:24:14

The Scots are passive, ignorant, and deluded.

0:24:140:24:18

The only race in history who've Bidden in the same category

0:24:200:24:25

Frae stert to present o their story

0:24:250:24:28

And deem their ignorance their glory

0:24:280:24:32

The mair they differ, mair the same

0:24:320:24:37

The wheel can whummle aa but them

0:24:370:24:40

They caa their obstinacy 'Hame'

0:24:400:24:43

And, "Puir Auld Scotland" bleat wi pride

0:24:440:24:49

And wi their minds made up to bide

0:24:490:24:54

A thorn in aa the wide world's side.

0:24:560:25:00

O Scotland is THE barren fig

0:25:010:25:04

Up, carles, up And roond it jig

0:25:040:25:06

Auld Moses took A dry stick and

0:25:060:25:09

Instantly it Flooered in his hand

0:25:090:25:12

Pu' Scotland up, And wha can say

0:25:120:25:14

It winna bud And blossom tae

0:25:140:25:17

A miracle's Oor only chance

0:25:170:25:19

Up, carles, up And let us dance!

0:25:190:25:21

It's a scene that I think is happening all over the world.

0:25:220:25:25

Small minorities, language minorities,

0:25:250:25:28

cultural minorities, asserting themselves and rebasing,

0:25:280:25:32

or trying to rebase, their cultures on an indigenous basis.

0:25:320:25:36

And it is exactly the same thing in Scotland.

0:25:360:25:39

It was a political and cultural manifesto,

0:25:420:25:45

a poem to be brandished as well as read.

0:25:450:25:48

And it contained the absolute essence of MacDiarmid.

0:25:480:25:51

His personal mission statement.

0:25:510:25:53

I'll ha'e nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be whaur

0:25:540:25:59

Extremes meet - it's the only way I ken

0:25:590:26:03

To dodge the curst conceit o' bein' richt

0:26:030:26:07

That damns the vast majority o' men.

0:26:070:26:10

A Drunk Man was published in November, 1926.

0:26:140:26:18

Edwin Muir's review described it as, "The only poem of importance

0:26:180:26:22

"in Scots which has appeared since the death of Burns."

0:26:220:26:26

Other reviews were less positive.

0:26:260:26:28

And sales were dire.

0:26:280:26:30

Trying to turn the Scottish public into political nationalists

0:26:300:26:33

by means of poetry was proving less than possible.

0:26:330:26:37

MacDiarmid's mind turned to more obvious approaches.

0:26:370:26:40

The National Party of Scotland was formed on the 10th May, 1928.

0:26:430:26:49

The single issue that united its founders

0:26:490:26:52

was their wish for Scottish home rule, or, as we'd say, "devolution".

0:26:520:26:56

MacDiarmid, of course, wanted complete independence.

0:26:560:26:59

His fellow founders thought that was too much to ask,

0:26:590:27:03

but at least he'd got the party started.

0:27:030:27:05

The NPS set about fielding candidates in by-elections,

0:27:050:27:10

pushing their home rule agenda.

0:27:100:27:11

It would be an exaggeration to say that nobody voted for them.

0:27:110:27:15

But only a slight one.

0:27:150:27:17

MacDiarmid's literary renaissance, however, was gathering pace.

0:27:180:27:22

Other novelists and poets were joining the cause of Scottish

0:27:220:27:25

literature, and for both movements,

0:27:250:27:27

MacDiarmid provided a public face, offering aggressively

0:27:270:27:31

anti-English analysis of any issue.

0:27:310:27:34

But soon convinced that the National Party was too timid,

0:27:340:27:37

MacDiarmid set up an organisation called Clan Albain,

0:27:370:27:41

one of whose many plots involved the capture of Edinburgh Castle.

0:27:410:27:45

In an article in the Daily Record, MacDiarmid wrote that the clan's

0:27:450:27:49

aims were essentially fascist and claimed that most of

0:27:490:27:52

the members of the National Party, were members of the clan as well.

0:27:520:27:56

I know no national liberation movement that has been won

0:27:560:28:00

without a terrible struggle, without civil disobedience, violence,

0:28:000:28:04

war or civil war.

0:28:040:28:06

No great national movement was ever founded on caution.

0:28:060:28:10

I do not understand at all how, in regard to any principle,

0:28:100:28:14

it can be claimed that one can go too far.

0:28:140:28:17

Slowly but surely, he became the rotten egg on the party's face

0:28:230:28:28

and was expelled from it in 1933,

0:28:280:28:31

on the grounds of his communism. His life was falling apart.

0:28:310:28:35

Peggy had left him

0:28:350:28:37

and the long-suffering owner of the Montrose Review had sacked him.

0:28:370:28:41

MacDiarmid took it all on his prominent chin.

0:28:430:28:46

Always desperate for money, he accepted the offer of cheap

0:28:460:28:49

accommodation on the island of Whalsay in the Shetlands.

0:28:490:28:53

This was a retreat, a withdrawal.

0:28:540:28:57

But, for MacDiarmid, it was a new beginning as well.

0:28:570:29:01

Here he wrote a major new poem that explored what Shetland

0:29:010:29:04

had to offer his bruised soul.

0:29:040:29:07

Now, as he'd created a new Scots, he created a new English.

0:29:070:29:12

And, in the stones of Shetland's beaches

0:29:120:29:15

and the language of geological science, he found a kind of peace.

0:29:150:29:20

All is lithogenesis or lochia

0:29:220:29:26

Carpolite fruit of the forbidden tree

0:29:260:29:28

Stones blacker than any in Caaba

0:29:280:29:31

Cream-coloured caen-stone, chatoyant pieces

0:29:330:29:36

Celadon and corbeau, bistre and beige

0:29:360:29:40

Glaucous, hoar, enfouldered, cyathiform...

0:29:400:29:45

Yes, MacDiarmid's been eating dictionaries again.

0:29:490:29:52

In this case, mainly the Chambers 20th Century English Dictionary,

0:29:520:29:56

but he's doing it for a very specific purpose.

0:29:560:30:00

Every one of these words, once you know what they mean, make perfect

0:30:000:30:03

sense, and are perfectly chosen

0:30:030:30:05

for a very, very great work of poetry.

0:30:050:30:08

This is a man who believes that easy words produce easy thoughts,

0:30:080:30:12

familiar words, familiar thoughts.

0:30:120:30:14

If you really want to challenge people and make them think harder,

0:30:140:30:17

you have to smash the language up and remake it.

0:30:170:30:20

And that's what he's doing.

0:30:200:30:22

A lot of people say that after his Scots poetry, MacDiarmid went off.

0:30:220:30:26

The correct literary critical term for this opinion is "wrong".

0:30:260:30:30

Scott, is it reasonable,

0:30:310:30:33

is it fair to describe On A Raised Beach as a great poem?

0:30:330:30:37

I think it's one of the great poems of the 20th century.

0:30:370:30:40

I think it's one of the great poems of the modern poetic movement.

0:30:400:30:44

It's one of certainly the great poems of MacDiarmid's career.

0:30:440:30:48

He talks about God in this poem. It's a sermonic poem.

0:30:480:30:52

He behaves in this poem as if he's a preacher at the pulpit,

0:30:520:30:55

saying things like, "We must be humble."

0:30:550:30:58

And it's an argumentative, kind of finger-wagging poem,

0:30:580:31:01

in some ways, and he talks about God, but it's not really,

0:31:010:31:04

I don't think, a religious poem in that sense and,

0:31:040:31:07

certainly not a Christian poem in that sense.

0:31:070:31:10

I think, in some ways, On A Raised Beach is a great materialist poem

0:31:100:31:13

because the meaning that he finds is a meaning in the earth,

0:31:130:31:16

and a meaning in the stones rather than a meaning in a hereafter.

0:31:160:31:20

So let us beware of death; the stones will have

0:31:250:31:29

Their revenge; we have lost all approach to them

0:31:290:31:34

But soon we shall become as those we have betrayed

0:31:360:31:40

And they will seal us as fast in our graves

0:31:400:31:43

As our indifference and ignorance seals them

0:31:430:31:48

But let us not be afraid to die.

0:31:500:31:53

No heavier and colder and quieter then

0:31:550:31:59

No more motionless, do stones lie

0:31:590:32:03

In death than in life to all men.

0:32:030:32:07

I produced an enormous amount of stuff there.

0:32:100:32:13

I found the change of environment extremely stimulating.

0:32:130:32:17

And I liked the Shetland people immensely.

0:32:170:32:19

But it didn't solve the problem of ways and means.

0:32:190:32:22

I had no visible means of support.

0:32:220:32:25

With the consequence that we had a very lean time indeed.

0:32:250:32:28

So, here we have a modernist poet,

0:32:310:32:33

isolated on the island of Whalsay, surrounded by little more

0:32:330:32:36

than stones, and writing a poem about the ultimate realities.

0:32:360:32:39

-At the same time, he's being spied upon by MI5.

-He was indeed.

0:32:390:32:43

He was watched by the security services from 1931

0:32:430:32:46

when he was in London, he goes to Shetland to live in Whalsay in 1933.

0:32:460:32:52

He's continually watched throughout this time.

0:32:520:32:55

Meanwhile, he was trying to propagandise for communism

0:32:550:32:58

with mixed success, he said delicately, on Whalsay.

0:32:580:33:01

Certainly on Whalsay, he had mixed success.

0:33:010:33:04

There were a few meetings that he held in cottages in Whalsay.

0:33:040:33:07

I think some people turned up for the promise, really, of free beer.

0:33:070:33:11

But the security services did take this seriously.

0:33:110:33:13

He was called "a rabid nationalist" by the security services.

0:33:130:33:17

And, so, they took his politics seriously,

0:33:170:33:20

and they took his politics seriously in relation to his family, too.

0:33:200:33:23

His first wife was tracked for

0:33:230:33:25

many, many years after MacDiarmid and she split up.

0:33:250:33:29

But how good were MI5, really? Here's one thing they missed.

0:33:310:33:35

The Stone of Destiny was the ancient bit of rock

0:33:350:33:38

on which Scottish kings were crowned.

0:33:380:33:41

It was nicked by that famous robber, Edward I of England,

0:33:410:33:45

and taken back down to London.

0:33:450:33:47

And there was a Scottish nationalist plot

0:33:470:33:49

in the 1930s to steal it back and return it to Scotland.

0:33:490:33:53

MacDiarmid was central to this plot.

0:33:530:33:55

All his letters about it were sent by Royal Mail.

0:33:550:33:58

And, yet, somehow, MI5 missed the entire thing.

0:33:580:34:03

On 15th of January, 1934, Graham MacGibbon,

0:34:050:34:09

the Glasgow-based engineer,

0:34:090:34:11

wrote to MacDiarmid in an ecstasy of anticipation.

0:34:110:34:16

"I am delighted to hear that things are moving

0:34:160:34:18

"and can almost visualise the symbol being borne along Princes Street

0:34:180:34:22

"in the glare of thousands of torches. What a scene!

0:34:220:34:26

"Remember, we're with you to the bitter end, and absolutely at

0:34:260:34:30

"your command as far as our present state of economic slavery permits."

0:34:300:34:35

On or around the 23rd January,

0:34:560:34:59

an observant verger might have seen a man prowling around the chair

0:34:590:35:04

and observing the stone with more than usual curiosity,

0:35:040:35:08

trying to guess its weight, and looking around for exit routes.

0:35:080:35:12

He drew a map which he then passed to MacDiarmid.

0:35:150:35:18

And here it is. The clearest possible demonstration

0:35:190:35:23

of the essential nature of the plan to steal the Stone of Scone.

0:35:230:35:27

It was, at its very best, sketchy.

0:35:270:35:30

MacDiarmid was obsessed by the idea of obtaining

0:35:320:35:36

a fast car for the getaway.

0:35:360:35:38

Graham MacGibbon disagreed. What if it broke down?

0:35:380:35:41

There would need to be at least three fast cars,

0:35:410:35:44

travelling in convoy.

0:35:440:35:46

And MacGibbon was also against the notion of taking

0:35:460:35:49

the stone up north by train. Which is a pity, really.

0:35:490:35:51

Imagine the notion of a hairy poet sitting overnight on the Flying Scot

0:35:510:35:56

with the Stone of Destiny bouncing above him in the luggage rack.

0:35:560:36:00

Had he made that momentous journey,

0:36:020:36:04

MacDiarmid's plan was to hide the stone in a Scottish burn,

0:36:040:36:07

where its true and fateful nature would be invisible.

0:36:070:36:11

MacDiarmid arrived in London in March 1934,

0:36:160:36:20

and he went to see the Muirs in their rented Hampstead house.

0:36:200:36:24

According to Willa Muir,

0:36:240:36:26

he very, very confidentially mentioned his plan

0:36:260:36:28

"to liberate the stone" and amused them

0:36:280:36:31

by talking again and again about the need for a fast car,

0:36:310:36:34

and raising money for that.

0:36:340:36:36

Because he then very, very confidentially mentioned his plan

0:36:360:36:40

to virtually every Scot living in London, he did raise the money.

0:36:400:36:44

But then came the problem because MacDiarmid

0:36:440:36:46

was a gregarious and open-handed man, and in this very pub,

0:36:460:36:51

he bought a round for each customer several times.

0:36:510:36:54

The fast car money made only one short journey,

0:36:540:36:59

from those beer taps to the urinals round the corner.

0:36:590:37:03

And as for the poor old Stone of Destiny,

0:37:030:37:06

it remained in the hands of the wicked English.

0:37:060:37:09

MacDiarmid always denied that the money had been misspent.

0:37:120:37:16

But he certainly returned to Whalsay without the stone.

0:37:160:37:19

He was profoundly depressed. He had something like a nervous breakdown.

0:37:210:37:26

He was now expelled from the Communist Party

0:37:260:37:28

for his excessive nationalist sympathies.

0:37:280:37:31

He seemed to belong nowhere, to no viable political tendency at all,

0:37:310:37:35

and his old friend Edwin Muir, once his closest collaborator,

0:37:350:37:39

was about to stab him in the back.

0:37:390:37:44

For two years, Muir had been struggling

0:37:440:37:47

with a sort of loss of faith.

0:37:470:37:49

In 1933, he'd been visiting Scotland,

0:37:510:37:53

driving in Lanarkshire, south of Glasgow,

0:37:530:37:56

an area in which industry was entering the last stages of its decline.

0:37:560:38:01

Edwin Muir was a terrible driver.

0:38:030:38:06

He was nervous and hesitant, and he preferred to drive

0:38:060:38:09

with the hood down, which meant that he had a lot of trouble

0:38:090:38:13

with insects and rain,

0:38:130:38:14

two phenomena that never occur in Scotland.

0:38:140:38:17

Anyway, he wasn't much interested in the road ahead,

0:38:180:38:21

he was too busy looking around him

0:38:210:38:24

gathering evidence on the condition of Scotland for a book.

0:38:240:38:28

Scottish Journey sounds like a jolly guidebook.

0:38:280:38:31

It is in fact, in the entire history of Scotland,

0:38:310:38:34

the single most dispiriting work ever written about the country.

0:38:340:38:38

The houses looked empty and unemployed, like their tenants,

0:38:400:38:45

and the road along which the car stumbled was pitted and rent,

0:38:450:38:51

as if it had been recently under shell-fire.

0:38:510:38:55

Everything had the look of a Sunday which had lasted for many years,

0:38:550:39:00

during which the bells had forgotten to ring.

0:39:000:39:04

A disused, slovenly, everlasting Sunday.

0:39:040:39:08

What he saw gnawed away at Muir,

0:39:090:39:13

and so he carried on, crisscrossing the whole of Scotland.

0:39:130:39:17

He didn't do it in a oner - he would come back

0:39:170:39:20

whenever he had time and could find a car to borrow.

0:39:200:39:23

The whole process took him two years.

0:39:230:39:25

By 1935, he had finished his long, sporadic road trip.

0:39:320:39:36

Scottish Journey gathered together his impressions of what he'd seen.

0:39:360:39:40

The emptiness in Lanarkshire was everywhere in Scotland.

0:39:400:39:46

No sign of any national culture.

0:39:460:39:48

No universal Scottishness.

0:39:480:39:51

The Borders differed from the Highlands.

0:39:510:39:55

Edinburgh and Glasgow were unalike.

0:39:550:39:58

The journey had ended in a hotel on the Beauly Firth,

0:40:040:40:07

not far from the battlefield of Culloden,

0:40:070:40:09

and it was here that Edwin Muir finally faced the fact

0:40:090:40:13

he could no longer keep faith with MacDiarmid's nationalist dreams.

0:40:130:40:17

I went over in my mind what Scottish history

0:40:180:40:21

I could remember, hoping to find some faint sign that Scotland's annals

0:40:210:40:27

need not have led to the end of Scotland as a nation.

0:40:270:40:30

But I reflected that Wallace had been betrayed,

0:40:300:40:34

I remembered Culloden and the Highland clans delivered

0:40:340:40:37

helpless to Cumberland because of the intrigues of their chieftains.

0:40:370:40:41

The pageant of Scottish history played through Muir's mind

0:40:430:40:47

and it told him a story of internal strife, wavering commitments

0:40:470:40:52

and unresolved differences.

0:40:520:40:55

The people of the kingdom of Scotland had consistently

0:40:550:40:58

failed to keep faith with one other.

0:40:580:41:02

There had been glorious victories such as Bannockburn,

0:41:020:41:05

but even that had been followed by squalid deals and backsliding.

0:41:050:41:10

For Muir, the truth was horribly simple.

0:41:100:41:13

There was no Scotland, because she had betrayed herself long ago.

0:41:130:41:19

It is these things that make

0:41:210:41:24

the National Party of Scotland so unconvincing.

0:41:240:41:28

One can see that self-government for Scotland is a desirable ideal,

0:41:280:41:32

but like all Utopian ideals,

0:41:320:41:35

it takes no account of history, past or present.

0:41:350:41:39

Muir looked into Scottish history

0:41:390:41:42

and all he saw was a lost and distant medieval kingdom.

0:41:420:41:47

What Scotland needed now wasn't nationalism.

0:41:470:41:50

It was socialism.

0:41:500:41:52

In his next book,

0:41:540:41:55

Scott And Scotland: The Predicament Of The Scottish Writer,

0:41:550:42:00

Muir went further still.

0:42:000:42:02

This was a meditation on the legacy of Walter Scott,

0:42:020:42:05

and on Edinburgh, a powerless capital city, a blank.

0:42:050:42:10

Muir laid much of the blame for Edinburgh's irrelevance,

0:42:100:42:13

and the demotion of the Scottish tongue at Scott's door,

0:42:130:42:16

but the damage, he felt, was done.

0:42:160:42:19

Muir concluded that writing in Scots dialect was inescapably provincial.

0:42:190:42:25

But the introduction was even worse.

0:42:250:42:27

In it, and Muir must have known the implications of what he was writing,

0:42:270:42:31

he said that the problems of Scotland would never

0:42:310:42:34

be solved by writing poems in Scots.

0:42:340:42:38

After 11 years of friendship and close collaboration,

0:42:380:42:43

Muir was rejecting everything that MacDiarmid was and stood for.

0:42:430:42:48

He and MacDiarmid never spoke again.

0:42:480:42:51

MacDiarmid hated Muir's belief that Scotland was a dead thing,

0:42:530:42:58

that its ills were curable only by a kind of wet socialism,

0:42:580:43:01

north and south of the Border,

0:43:010:43:04

that would make the Border itself irrelevant.

0:43:040:43:07

But he couldn't avoid the fact of Scotland's apathy,

0:43:070:43:10

or the fact that Scots habitually sent large numbers

0:43:100:43:14

of Unionist Tory MPs down to Westminster.

0:43:140:43:16

He railed more fiercely than ever.

0:43:160:43:20

By the beginning of 1940, he was writing poems

0:43:220:43:24

in which he contemplated the bombing of London by German planes

0:43:240:43:28

and admitted, "He couldna care".

0:43:280:43:30

Letters in which he said the Nazis were less damaging

0:43:300:43:35

than the English bourgeoisie.

0:43:350:43:37

It's not really politics, is it? It's spittle.

0:43:370:43:40

In the aftermath of that second apocalypse, there was

0:43:490:43:53

a genuine consensus in British politics.

0:43:530:43:55

An agreement between both Labour and Conservative politicians

0:43:550:43:59

that there was a debt owed to soldiers that had lived and died,

0:43:590:44:02

to their families - indeed, to an entire class.

0:44:020:44:05

Labour created the welfare state,

0:44:070:44:09

but the Tories certainly didn't dismantle it.

0:44:090:44:11

Council houses, the Coal Board, the Gas Board, British Steel,

0:44:110:44:15

British Rail, the National Health Service,

0:44:150:44:17

state education, free milk, free teeth.

0:44:170:44:21

Here was the socialism, north and south of the Border,

0:44:210:44:25

that Muir had called for.

0:44:250:44:27

And in this climate, MacDiarmid's twin demands -

0:44:270:44:29

republican communism and Scottish nationalism - seemed ludicrous.

0:44:290:44:34

And there was a sort of rebirth of Britishness, too,

0:44:410:44:45

which began with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

0:44:450:44:49

She presided over a New Elizabethan age in which the nation's

0:44:490:44:53

gift to her was built at John Brown's shipyard in Clydebank.

0:44:530:44:58

The Royal Yacht Britannia.

0:44:580:45:02

And an idea of Britishness set sail with her,

0:45:050:45:09

in which Hugh MacDiarmid was picturesque, entertaining,

0:45:090:45:13

and irrelevant, in receipt of that final insult.

0:45:130:45:17

He was rewarded a special pension,

0:45:170:45:20

for services to literature, society and culture.

0:45:200:45:25

A civil list pension from the very same Westminster government

0:45:250:45:29

he was so determined to overthrow.

0:45:290:45:31

And he took it.

0:45:310:45:34

Even poets have to eat. But where did it leave him?

0:45:340:45:37

An Establishment trophy on the wall,

0:45:370:45:40

a spiky little pet, a rebel poet no longer?

0:45:400:45:44

Over to the Highlands to Perth.

0:45:440:45:47

No. The civil list pension was just another contradiction.

0:45:470:45:51

He remained a rebel poet happy to bite the hand that fed him.

0:45:510:45:55

In the general election of 1964,

0:45:580:46:00

MacDiarmid stood for the Communist Party

0:46:000:46:02

in the constituency of Kinross and West Perthshire

0:46:020:46:06

against the then-Prime Minister, the Conservative Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

0:46:060:46:10

Sir Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home,

0:46:100:46:13

16,659.

0:46:130:46:17

Andrew Forrester,

0:46:170:46:20

4,687.

0:46:200:46:23

Christopher Murray Grieve, 127.

0:46:230:46:28

JEERING AND CHEERING

0:46:280:46:32

I, therefore, declare that Sir Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home...

0:46:320:46:37

MacDiarmid described his opponent

0:46:370:46:39

as "a yes-man of the Pentagon" and "a zombie".

0:46:390:46:42

He was still doing his job,

0:46:420:46:43

still the same communist nationalist troublemaker as ever,

0:46:430:46:47

and he carried on right into the 1970s,

0:46:470:46:50

when I first encountered his work at the age of 16.

0:46:500:46:53

I literally pulled a book off the shelf

0:46:550:46:57

and opened it in a library, and I was immediately transfixed.

0:46:570:47:01

I had never read anything remotely like this before.

0:47:010:47:05

And for all the offensive extremism of the politics,

0:47:050:47:08

and the difficulty of the Scots, there was something

0:47:080:47:11

about the language. It was speckled, it was hard-edged,

0:47:110:47:14

it was adamantine, it gripped.

0:47:140:47:16

MacDiarmid crawled up my nostrils and into my brain

0:47:160:47:20

and he has been sitting there, fizzing away, ever since.

0:47:200:47:23

MacDiarmid fizzed away on television too, reliably providing

0:47:250:47:29

cross-grained political opinions whenever required.

0:47:290:47:33

MacDiarmid, 86 this month,

0:47:330:47:35

lives here at Biggar in the Lanarkshire hills.

0:47:350:47:37

In his poetry, he tackles what he sees as a crucial matter,

0:47:370:47:40

the revival of Scots as a literary language.

0:47:400:47:43

How far did it succeed?

0:47:430:47:45

In all our universities, there are courses in Scottish literature.

0:47:450:47:49

That's all within the last 20 years.

0:47:490:47:52

It's a radical change, and it's bound to bear fruit

0:47:520:47:56

with subsequent generations.

0:47:560:47:58

The older ones, even the writers,

0:47:580:48:02

my own generation and so on,

0:48:020:48:05

we're brought up wholly on English literature.

0:48:050:48:08

-You're very pleased about the change.

-I'm very pleased about it

0:48:080:48:11

and I would like to see it go very much further.

0:48:110:48:13

How much further?

0:48:130:48:16

Well, English is a compulsory subject.

0:48:160:48:18

I don't see why it should be.

0:48:180:48:20

Why not French?

0:48:200:48:21

What do you think is the connection between political identity,

0:48:210:48:26

a sense of nationhood, and a country's cultural development?

0:48:260:48:31

They're inseverable from my point of view.

0:48:310:48:35

I can't see any break between them.

0:48:350:48:37

I certainly wouldn't be writing the kind of poetry I have written

0:48:370:48:41

if I weren't a Scottish nationalist and a communist.

0:48:410:48:45

Hugh MacDiarmid lived to a ripe old age,

0:49:100:49:13

with his National Health Service gnashers,

0:49:130:49:16

sustained by a diet of tea, biscuits, whisky and cigarettes,

0:49:160:49:20

with his beloved second wife Valda,

0:49:200:49:23

living in this tiny cottage in the Scottish Borders.

0:49:230:49:27

He died of cancer in 1978,

0:49:270:49:30

a hinge year in the story of modern Britain,

0:49:300:49:35

just after that great celebration of Britishness

0:49:350:49:38

which was the Queen's Silver Jubilee,

0:49:380:49:40

and just before the arrival in power of Margaret Thatcher,

0:49:400:49:44

and the death of the consensus politics

0:49:440:49:46

through which he'd lived so much of his life.

0:49:460:49:50

There are no Hugh MacDiarmid poems, therefore, about Thatcherism,

0:49:500:49:54

more's the pity.

0:49:540:49:56

The political world has changed almost out of recognition

0:50:030:50:07

since Hugh MacDiarmid's death.

0:50:070:50:10

A majority of English voters

0:50:100:50:12

seemed to turn away from the post-war consensus.

0:50:120:50:15

Industrial confrontation, unpopular wars abroad,

0:50:150:50:19

and a belief that it was no longer possible

0:50:190:50:21

to achieve a social democratic welfare state via Westminster

0:50:210:50:25

turned more and more Scots towards independence.

0:50:250:50:28

But if Alex Salmond was prepared to quote MacDiarmid,

0:50:320:50:34

the modern SNP's version of independence

0:50:340:50:37

was a million miles away from his communist and anti-English Utopia.

0:50:370:50:42

It was deliberately centre ground.

0:50:420:50:45

The angry old man would have been entirely contemptuous.

0:50:450:50:50

So, Hugh MacDiarmid left no legacy to modern Scotland?

0:50:510:50:55

Not true. But it was mainly a cultural legacy,

0:50:550:50:58

not a political one.

0:50:580:50:59

When he started, there were very few serious Scottish writers,

0:50:590:51:03

and hardly any who actually lived in Scotland.

0:51:030:51:06

And now, partly thanks to him, that is absolutely not true.

0:51:060:51:09

There was first the great Scottish Renaissance generation,

0:51:090:51:12

people like Robert Garioch, Norman MacCaig, Lewis Grassic Gibbon,

0:51:120:51:16

Sydney Goodsir Smith.

0:51:160:51:18

Great writers, all of them. Neil Gunn, the great novelist.

0:51:180:51:22

Then after that, more and more writers of all kinds

0:51:220:51:25

pouring out through Scotland. The list is almost too long to remember,

0:51:250:51:28

but I'm going to try. Kathleen Jamie,

0:51:280:51:30

Robert Crawford, Liz Lochhead, Edwin Morgan, Jackie Kay,

0:51:300:51:34

Andrew Greig, Alasdair Gray, Robin Jenkins, Don Paterson,

0:51:340:51:37

AL Kennedy, John Burnside, James Kelman, Janice Galloway,

0:51:370:51:40

James Robertson, James Meek, Irvine Welsh, Iain Banks,

0:51:400:51:44

Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Atkinson, Allan Massie,

0:51:440:51:46

and in a sense, they're all MacDiarmid's children,

0:51:460:51:49

because he taught the Scots to do it BIG,

0:51:490:51:51

do it NOW, and do it HERE.

0:51:510:51:55

He was a towering, towering figure,

0:51:570:51:59

and vitally important.

0:51:590:52:02

I think people now feel that they don't need to be validated elsewhere,

0:52:020:52:07

I think that was one of things he gave.

0:52:070:52:09

He took that position.

0:52:090:52:12

"I can do this and I can self-validate.

0:52:120:52:16

"I have the right to write in this language

0:52:160:52:19

"and be regarded as an international modernist poet."

0:52:190:52:22

I suppose, MacDiarmid gave people the sense

0:52:220:52:27

to make themselves central, just as he did himself.

0:52:270:52:31

I think there seems to have been a big difference

0:52:310:52:34

between the public MacDiarmid -

0:52:340:52:35

aggressive, embattled, provocative MacDiarmid -

0:52:350:52:38

-and the man, Chris Grieve.

-Because he changed his mind all the time.

0:52:380:52:41

-All the time.

-He didn't have an easy life.

0:52:410:52:43

MacDiarmid did not have an easy life.

0:52:430:52:46

He didn't make his life easy for himself, he never sought that out.

0:52:460:52:50

I think there's a sort of element of that

0:52:520:52:55

in very many of us Scots.

0:52:550:52:57

His thrawnness, we might kind of roll our eyes at it,

0:52:570:53:01

but we admire it deeply.

0:53:010:53:03

Most people don't understand poets.

0:53:080:53:11

They see them as rebels against the system

0:53:130:53:16

to which they themselves have automatically conformed.

0:53:160:53:19

Poets are a very small minority of people,

0:53:210:53:23

who for some obscure reason have failed to grow up.

0:53:230:53:28

Everyone living in Scotland today

0:53:310:53:33

has to wrestle with the same questions about security,

0:53:330:53:36

prosperity, identity, democracy.

0:53:360:53:39

In this series, they've seen that they are not alone and never have been.

0:53:390:53:43

In James Boswell, the great and lovable journalist,

0:53:430:53:47

we have seen the tension between the fruits the Union has to offer

0:53:470:53:51

and instinctive Scottish patriotism.

0:53:510:53:53

Sir Walter Scott was a Unionist and a Tory tormented by some

0:53:540:53:58

of the things the modern world had done to his beloved Scotland.

0:53:580:54:02

And Hugh MacDiarmid, the greatest modern Scottish poet,

0:54:020:54:05

was a ferocious believer in independence and Scottish identity,

0:54:050:54:10

but his extremism has made him almost a modern pariah.

0:54:100:54:14

MacDiarmid's monument, his memorial,

0:54:190:54:23

is near his birthplace, Langholm.

0:54:230:54:25

You get the feeling that they are proud of him.

0:54:250:54:28

"Slow down, here comes Langholm, birthplace of Hugh MacDiarmid,"

0:54:280:54:32

say the signs as you drive into the town.

0:54:320:54:34

But they keep him at a certain distance, too.

0:54:350:54:39

The monument is hidden away in the treeless hills behind the town.

0:54:390:54:44

In 1970, the idea of giving MacDiarmid

0:54:530:54:57

the freedom of the borough was briefly mooted,

0:54:570:54:59

but they gave it to Neil Armstrong instead,

0:54:590:55:02

because the first man on the moon's distant ancestors came from round here.

0:55:020:55:06

The monument, to borrow one of the phrases of the man himself,

0:55:080:55:12

is "an antrin thing". You won't see anything else quite like it.

0:55:120:55:17

It's a rusting representation of an open book,

0:55:170:55:20

full of images from his poetry.

0:55:200:55:22

On worse days than this, the wind whistles through it.

0:55:240:55:27

It hums to itself.

0:55:270:55:29

I like it.

0:55:310:55:32

I think it's exactly right.

0:55:320:55:34

It's like the man himself.

0:55:340:55:37

Inconvenient.

0:55:370:55:38

Angular.

0:55:380:55:39

Undeniable.

0:55:390:55:41

Do you know, it would be the easiest thing in the world

0:55:440:55:47

to totally dismiss Hugh MacDiarmid. Very, very simple.

0:55:470:55:50

He had hateful opinions, he was horrible about the English,

0:55:500:55:54

he was naive about Marxism,

0:55:540:55:56

he was wrong when he was young about fascism,

0:55:560:55:59

and much else besides.

0:55:590:56:01

A dead easy call.

0:56:010:56:03

And that is presumably why so many people in the Yes Campaign

0:56:030:56:07

and the No Campaign would love never to hear the words

0:56:070:56:10

"Hugh MacDiarmid" ever again, never mind have them splashed

0:56:100:56:14

all over the BBC.

0:56:140:56:15

But here's the little problem that they've got, the tiny problem.

0:56:150:56:20

Scotland today is culturally - never mind politics, culturally -

0:56:200:56:25

a nest of singing birds, a garden of delights.

0:56:250:56:28

It is crammed with wonderful poets, novelists, writers of all kinds,

0:56:280:56:34

artists, sculptors, composers, musicians.

0:56:340:56:37

I think, culturally, Scotland is as self-confident

0:56:370:56:41

as anywhere else in Europe.

0:56:410:56:43

And that was certainly not the case when Hugh MacDiarmid got started.

0:56:430:56:48

Scotland is on fire.

0:56:480:56:50

Who set the blaze? He did!

0:56:500:56:53

Scotland small?

0:57:040:57:06

Our multiform, our infinite Scotland small?

0:57:060:57:11

Only as a patch of hillside may be a cliche corner

0:57:110:57:16

To a fool who cries "Nothing but heather!"

0:57:160:57:20

Where in September another

0:57:200:57:22

Sitting there and resting and gazing around

0:57:220:57:26

Sees not only heather but blaeberries

0:57:260:57:30

With bright green leaves and leaves already turned scarlet

0:57:300:57:35

Hiding ripe blue berries, and amongst the sage-green leaves

0:57:350:57:39

Of the bog-myrtle the golden flowers of the tormentil shining

0:57:390:57:44

And nodding harebells vying in their colour

0:57:440:57:47

With the blue butterflies that poise themselves delicately upon them

0:57:470:57:52

And stunted rowans with harsh dry leaves of glorious colour

0:57:520:57:59

"Nothing but heather!"

0:57:590:58:02

How marvellously descriptive!

0:58:020:58:06

And incomplete!

0:58:060:58:09

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