Brownsbank Cottage celebration will mark Hugh MacDiarmid's influence

Gerda is a poet and short story writer, as well as an actor and director. Sally is a TV broadcaster and reporter but also a novelist and memoirist, whose account of her mother’s experience of dementia, Where Memories Go (2014), and her own experience of caring for her, is both moving and deeply helpful and encouraging to all of us who have faced similar circumstance.

Gerry is a poet, former Brownsbank Writing Fellow, and editor of The Dark Horse, a beautifully-produced Scottish-American literary periodical.

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We’ll present a sampling of our recent work partly for its own sake but also in celebration of Hugh MacDiarmid, acknowledging his example and by our own work demonstrating that a range of different voices is the best way to honour him. None of us is a disciple, and MacDiarmid wouldn’t have wanted disciples in any case. You remember his command?

Gin Glesca folk are tired o’ Hengler,
And still need breid and circuses, there’s Spengler,
Or gin ye s’ud need mair than ane to teach ye,
Then learn frae Dostoevski and frae Nietzsche.

And let the lesson be – to be yersel’s,
Ye needna fash gin it’s to be ocht else.
To be yersel’s – and to mak’ that worth bein’.
Nae harder job to mortals has been gi’en.

It’s worth savouring that, and thinking about it. How many of us stay addicted to no more than the 2020s equivalent of the circuses run by Frederick Charles Hengler (1820-1887)? Hengler’s “Cirque” started up in 1848, and Hengler himself abandoned traditional big top tents and put the shows on in spacious premises in large cities.

By 1875, Hengler’s Circuses were established in Glasgow, Liverpool, Edinburgh and London, finally reaching their highest popularity after his death, in the Hippodrome in Sauchiehall Street in 1904.

(Image: SMG Newspapers Ltd)

Well, says MacDiarmid (above), if you get tired of the circus (for which, we might read the tiresome Marvel multiverse, the culture’s commercialised Calvinists, or mainstream media propaganda, endless Netflix melodramas, and all such “spectacular” fictions), then go and read Spengler. You remember Spengler?

Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler (1880-1936), German historian, philosopher, mathematician, scientist, most famous for his very big and very heavy book The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), published 1918-22. T

here’s not much of the circus in Spengler. Buckle down. Get sober. Apply yourself to self-betterment.

You’ll get as much fun as you need.

MacDiarmid’s sarcasm could be hard and nasty but it’s more than that: it’s fast and furious and funny as well. And then, he goes on, if our great Scottish educational system isn’t quite sufficient for you (he’s writing in 1925), try a dose of Dostoevski or a wee nip of Nietzsche. (They were not exactly set texts in the 1920s Scotland schools curricula. Nor are they now.)

Then MacDiarmid delivers the central injunction: Here’s the lesson: To be yourselves. Fair enough, that’s good, but on its own, it’s banal. It’s the advice old Polonius gives to his son Laertes, in Hamlet: “This above all: to thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

Sure. Okay. Fine. But that gets us nowhere. It’s pretty obvious, if you think about it. But now MacDiarmid twists the knife hard: “…And to mak’ that worth bein’.” That’s the difficult job, to turn what you are into something worthwhile. Not ever an easy thing to do, and perhaps in many respects even more difficult now, in 2024, than it was in 1925.

That’s the spirit in which we’ll be reading our work in the first half of the programme. In the second half, we’ll be presenting a sequence of MacDiarmid’s own poems, taking us through the trajectory of his long life, in five sections, bringing him into the immediacy of the present day: what does he have to tell us, now.

Beginning with “Out of the Victorian Era” we come to “The First World War, Resistance and Renaissance” and then “Exile, Regeneration and a New Vision of Scotland”, “MacDiarmid and Scotland Now” and finally, “And the Future”.

Gerda will read from her collection of short stories, Tomorrow’s Feast, and her poetry collection, Quines, a book-length sequence presenting poetic portraits and brief biographies of a whole history of Scottish women, from prehistory to the 21st century.

Gerry will read from his memoir An Ayrshire Nestling, which Edwin Morgan’s biographer, James McGonigal, described as “A marvel. The blend of life writing, natural history and prose poetry is strikingly authentic and moving… a remarkable survivor’s story.”

Sally will read from her 2023 novel, Music in the Dark, set over one night in July 1884, in a tenement room-and-kitchen in Rutherglen near Glasgow, but roaming back across generations, as a displaced, working-class Highland woman explores the Highland Clearances and their aftermath through the experiences of the women who tried to resist eviction in Strathcarron in 1854. 

The book was praised by another former Brownsbank Writing Fellow, James Robertson: “An engrossing, beautifully written novel about the Highland Clearances and the long-term physical, emotional and psychological damage done to those who were forced from their homes and homeland. Like all good historical fiction, it both illuminates the past and speaks eloquently to the present.”

Gerda and I will also read poems by Aonghas MacNeacail, the Gaelic poet and another former Brownsbank Writing Fellow. Aonghas is one of two former Brownsbank Fellows long-listed for the 2024 Saltire Society Literary Awards. Aonghas’s book of previously unpublished poems in English is entitled beyond.

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The other long-listed former Fellow is Carl MacDougall, with his memoir of his childhood in post-war Glasgow and Fife, Already, Too Late. 

Aonghas’s beyond (Shearsman Books) is long-listed for Poetry Book of the Year and Carl’s Already, Too Late (Luath Press) is long-listed for Non-Fiction Book of the Year. Both books were published posthumously in 2023. Aonghas was Brownsbank Fellow from 1999 to 2002, and Carl was at Brownsbank from 2008 to 2011.

This is simply to acknowledge the quality of work of very different kinds that has come from the Brownsbank Writing Fellows, which, in one way or another, MacDiarmid himself, and his wife Valda, and the cottage they lived in, has inspired.

And I’d like to draw attention here to another Brownsbank Fellow, Lorna J Waite, whose poems have recently been published in a handsome volume by Main Point Books. Here’s a lovely little poem by Lorna that very simply states the declaration of allegiance:

Moonluck
On the anniversary of Chris’s death,
Hugh’s Moon brought out
The shadow of white roses.
Close to an image of Valda,
I cry with the luminous
Beauty of influence.

It’s the “Beauty” of influence that is softly and gently registered here – not the “anxiety” of influence that Harold Bloom and other literary critics go on about. 
There’s also the exhilaration of influence, the pleasure of it. 

Lorna’s poems address the residency in Brownsbank lovingly: she cared for the place and its 
former inhabitants, and was not ever given to dismissing them for their sometimes extremist or rebarbative pronouncements and provocations. 

Here she is, looking beyond the garden outside:

The Trees Were Dancin
The firs squeak like new leather shoes
On the polished floor o the wind
Swayin in a shamanic dance, groanin an twirlin
In the fresh autumnal breeze o decay
The death o the old leaf begins
Rowans rollercoaster an tummel,
Lifted up upon jet stream of cool air,
A flourish of gallus red glint afore the cloud occluded
Sunny rain sparkles water on huddled berries,
Cuddled thigither in the safety o nummers.
Bonnie broukit Brownsbank
I will keep the windaes licht
Ne’er smoor the flame o language
Lickin damp walls, this hoose
Needs the heartbeats o poets,
Maintainin yer hame in permanent grace,
No a halfway holiday hoose
Abandoned tae the winter o colonial neglect,
The writer’s hoose needs its workers,
Warmin the foundations o new thought.

“Bonnie broukit Brownsbank” is how the cottage is right now, still in desperate need of funds to repair and recover its former water- and wind-proof resonance for writers, artists and researchers to rediscover.

There’s no doubt, on the strength of these moving, very personal poems, that Lorna Waite’s engagement with the cottage and its memories and auras was something she exercised willfully, decidedly. 

She polishes MacDiarmid’s leather chair – and sits in it herself! She’s not merely reverential. As a feminist, how could she have been?

But when she suggests that it isn’t the moon that moves the cycle of blood in the bodies of her sister women, but that women themselves have such intrinsic magnetism, their vulnerable bodies here on earth are what moves the moon, you realize you’re in the presence of a poet of unusual perception and commitment. MacDiarmid would have approved.

When she writes about Burns, that perception takes a new turn: “Underpinning the configurations of place in the celebration of the Burns Supper, the local and the community, are the universal themes of mythic discourse; the constancy of the relationship between the biological and the cultural; food, reproduction, death, the life of the spirit and the spirit of the life of the community as made alive through the narratives of culture; music, poetry, shared song.

READ MORE: Reclaiming our cultural identity

“The ritual aspects of his celebration can be interpreted through different lenses which act as interpretive devices through which narratives are formed; the close-up personal experiences of class and gender, the wider viewpoint of religion and the nation-state. Together, these elements make up an identity kit, a placing of ourselves in relation to a myth.”

What she’s doing in a passage like that, I think, is taking Burns out of the familiar zones of accepted interpretation and cliché and relocating him. The poet’s “Immortal Memory” is in fact not a fabrication or fetishisation, but rather a “rite of cultural exchange, [which] provides a gauge for the psychological value of Burns to the development of […] a poetic drama of class”.

She goes on: “What is the place of individual experience of self in the making of this mythic construction? In the making of myth and the participation in ritual, what are the psychological motivations for folk, what does it do to them, what do they make of it? How does it make you feel?”

It’s a good question. If there were ever a MacDiarmid Supper, Lorna would have been the person to give it its lodestar: “To think about these questions, it is necessary to consider several fields of enquiry; firstly, the function of myth and ritual, secondly, the relationship of autobiography to myth and thirdly, the relationship of the myth, the artist and his art to the idea a culture has of itself however impoverished, corrupted or masked this becomes over time.”

Aonghas MacNeacail (1942-2022), Carl MacDougall (1941-2023) and Lorna J Waite (1964-2023): three of the finest, most distinctive voices to pass through Brownsbank, to feel the touch of MacDiarmid and his wife Valda, to acknowledge their inspiration in the true sense of that word, to write and to become themselves – and to mak’ that worth bein’. They did the hard job mortality insists upon.

We’re celebrating their achievements and reading from our own work as a kind of testament to the diversity of different voices MacDiarmid has inspired.

I even mean the word literally. Like all great writers and artists, he gives us breath, he helps us to live, fully, not wanting more but wanting better. As he puts it in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926):

I doot I’m geylies mixed, like wsel’,
But I was never ane that thocht to pit
An ocean in a mutchkin. As the haill’s
Mair than the pairt sae I than reason yet.

I dinna haud the warld’s end in my heid
As maist folk think they dae; nor filter truth
In fishy gills through which its tides may poor
For ony animalculae forsooth.

I lauch to see my crazy little brain
– And ither folks’ – tak’n’ itsel’ seriously,
And in a sudden lowe o’ fun my saul
Blinks dozent as the owl I ken’t to be.

I’ll ha’e nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be whaur
Extremes meet – it’s the only way I ken
To dodge the curst conceit o’ bein’ richt
That damns the vast majority o’ men.

I’ll bury nae heid like an ostrich’s,
Nor yet believe my een and naething else.
My senses may advise me, but I’ll be
Mysel’ nae maitter what they tell’s….

I ha’e nae doot some foreign philosopher
Has wrocht a system oot to justify
A’ this: but I’m a Scot wha blin’ly follows
Auld Scottish instincts, and I winna try.

For I’ve nae faith in ocht I can explain,
And stert whaur the philosophers leave aff…

Which is where we shall begin, at the Biggar & Upper Clydesdale Museum, Biggar, at 4pm until 6pm, on Saturday, October 26. And who knows where we might go with such riches? 

Tickets for the event are available HERE and click HERE for  MacDiarmid’s Brownsbank website.