Hugh MacDiarmid: All about the poet's 1930s Shetland retreat

These places were not islands but in Mandelstam’s and Pound’s case might as well have been. Islands also imprison. Prisons confine and isolate. Remember the Gulag Archipelago.

Rilke we know was particularly important for MacDiarmid in the 1930s. The poem from his book Stony Limits (1934), “Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum” is dedicated to Rilke. It’s well-nigh impossible to think of “On a Raised Beach”, the greatest single poem in that volume, coming into being without Rilke’s “Duino Elegies” for technical and existential inspiration (just so, more quietly, for Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone”). Charles Doughty the poet and traveller, author of Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888), was also a vital presence: the title poem “Stony Limits” is dedicated to his memory. (“Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum” – which means “footsteps do not go backwards” or, effectively, “we do not retreat”, certainly a MacDiarmidian sentiment, was the motto of “The Golden Dawn” – the first version of Yeats’s A Vision is dedicated “To Vestigia”.) All of which is to remind us that MacDiarmid is a modernist on Whalsay who had got his modernism in London, much in the pages of AR Orage’s periodical The New Age and from the intellectual world Orage haunted. MacDiarmid describes The Islands of Scotland (1939) as “a poet’s book, albeit a modernist poet’s” (p.27). Even allowing for his poverty and psychological distress at the time (he would suffer a nervous breakdown in 1935, following his recent divorce and separation from his children from his first marriage), it should surprise no-one that he chose to withdraw to Whalsay. Hadn’t he vowed in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926) that he would have no half-way house but ever be where extremes meet?

Extremes certainly did meet. They met vitally and challengingly as poetic experiment too. But MacDiarmid was wholly unlike the interlopers we’ve discussed in these essays so far. The poet of “Shetland Lyrics” who could be at ease and could rough it with the local fishermen, could, and would, also put noses out of joint, with the Lerwick literati, “the smug bourgeois” as he calls them in Lucky Poet (p.51); with the local gentry; and ultimately of course with the British state. You could not have made it up.

Perhaps we don’t all know the story of the farcical layers of state surveillance placed upon the poet, from Lerwick to London. So I’ll say a few words about them.

File KV2 (CM Grieve) in London’s National Archives bears remarkably bulky witness – including copies of excellent, uncollected intercepted letters by MacDiarmid – to the tissues of hearsay, speculation, and malice that served for the larger part to occupy numerous agents (or as MacDiarmid called them “dickers”) in contriving, in the end, to keep the lucky poet “on the invasion list” though “probably” unnecessarily as Richard Brooman-White of MI5 concluded to Major Peter Perfect (these characters had wonderful names – double-barrelled Aiken-Sneath another). It is “probably” unnecessarily as Brooman-White wrote, on March 16, 1941 “as no doubt the local police and military are all standing around to pounce on him.

READ MORE: The Unnameable Archipelago: A different way of thinking about these islands

Whalsay was a panopticon, an open prison, in a sense, a Siberia, a gulag without Stalin, and MacDiarmid had sentenced himself and handed himself into it. Interception of mail is very simply conducted where the intended recipient lives in isolation on a small island.

This kind of furtive attention – spooking, in other words – can and is intended to damage your mind. Playwrights among my readers should seriously consider writing a drama about MacDiarmid on Whalsay. Seamus Heaney was right when he described this period as “the most moving in the whole of MacDiarmid’s life”. It is intensely moving and cries out for the stage, the theatre in the round. In the right hands it would be a major means of bringing MacDiarmid to the fore again, nationally and internationally: farce and tragedy would commingle there, in a cocktail that someone like Martin MacDonagh, author of The Lieutenant of Inishmore and The Cripple of Inishmaan might concoct to perfection.

AS I’ve said, MacDiarmid was wholly unlike the interlopers we’ve discussed so far for the way he coped with what was at times a nightmare of isolation, ill-health, want, and hardship. Sydney Graham in Cornwall is more like him. These men were made of resilient and resourceful stuff, as indeed were their wives, Nessie Dunsmuir and Valda Trevlyn. They knew the breadline from birth. They certainly had no false pride, no preciousness, no petty personal vanity. They lived for their art, like African-American be-bop jazz musicians, and made no compromise with any institution or establishment. Yet, as we’d expect from his origins, MacDiarmid, thrawn though he was, could be at everyday ordinary ease with his neighbours and other acquaintances.

In the last few weeks, we’ve looked at the work of JM Synge and Tim Robinson, but Synge was a gentleman scholar of Anglo-Irish stock and his stays on Inis Meain were little more than extended holidays (I seem to recall reading somewhere that his mother, or another family member, was able to arrange to send him out fresh eggs); Tim Robinson (who had his own nervous breakdown on Inis Mor) was in it for the long-haul. Although he had at one point to sign on for the dole, this was only a hiccup in his economy, for throughout his adult life his endeavours were bankrolled by his father (a wise businessman who could not have invested better).

READ MORE: Robert Flaherty and Tim Robinson mapping the Aran Islands

MacDiarmid was utterly different, also I suppose in being primarily a poet, a person who was “rather intent upon the connectivity between solitude and universality” (as he says in The Islands of Scotland, p.6) and concerned “mainly with spiritual matters” (p.19), though he saw that such matters “have an important practical coefficient”. He went to the Shetland Isles to write poems and to heal his heart, not primarily to study the Isles and their people or to learn Norn. He stayed on.

Inevitably, as he said, “the Northern light and geology of the Shetland landscape” had their effect and are written into the Stony Limits poems (as he says in the Author’s Note to Stony Limits, Scots Unbound and Other Poems). He could “feel as if the landscape and I / Became each other” (“Stony Limits”). It was a place where, as he says in “On a Raised Beach”: A man must shed the encumbrances that muffle Contact with elemental things, the subtleties That seem inseparable from a humane life, and go apart Into a simple and sterner world… There’s something biblical about it and also about MacDiarmid: an ineradicable, radical, Christianity (something Seamus Heaney saw in him too).

In telling of his impecunious condition, MacDiarmid said he could only write what he lived. He lived not only in material poverty but in intellectual turmoil, in ideological commotion between the poles of nationalism and communism, devouring the most recondite publications on the widest imaginable ranges of subject, though reading matter of any serious kind was hard to come by on Whalsay. MacDiarmid was truly an autodidact. When he said he wrote what he lived, he also meant he wrote what he read, for he lived much in books, in a manner that that supposed entity, the “common reader” may find hard be comfortable with. Lucky Poet (1943), his ramshackle autobiography (even more ramshackle than Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria) was, Alan Riach tells us, almost entirely written on Shetland. It is full of riches but living proof too of its author’s assertion that he could only write what he lived or as he lived.

READ MORE: Alan Riach: Exploring MacDiarmid's Legacy. Part Two

MACDIARMID had from early on scraped a living as a local reporter and he continued scraping a living as a hack for the press whenever he could. He also hacked for publishers, but with a difference.

The Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry (1940) was one such commission, and yet contrives to be a key work in the MacDiarmid canon, reflecting in its selection the editor’s ambition that Scottish literature should not just fully embrace the Scots tradition but also embrace and integrate the Gaelic (and the medieval Latin) traditions into a new Scottish canon. It also shows MacDiarmid seeking to map Scotland’s northern culture back to the springs of Asian antiquity. There were few limits to his ambition. It is an important book. The Batsford Guide, The Islands of Scotland, is another such undertaking.

Next week, in the final essay in this series, Andrew McNeillie returns to MacDiarmid’s great book of poems of that era Stony Limits and takes us to the “Stony Limits” of his archipelagic explorations, showing how the “greatest exclave” of our north-west European archipelago may be the faraway centre of all things, for islands and nations everywhere The 12th issue of Andrew McNeillie’s intermittent periodical Archipelago, with contributions from National writers Alan Riach and John Purser, is now available from Clutag Press: https://www.clutagpress.com/