WE ended last week’s essay emphasising the perennial need for a real prospect of regeneration. It’s a familiar story but one which always needs fresh telling through all the resources of the arts and education, even – no, especially – in times of war and in nations and cities whose very identity, their people and their culture, might be under threat. Alan Riach speculates on these questions.

IN his autobiography Lucky Poet (1943), Hugh MacDiarmid misquotes Thomas Hardy, but to good effect:

If Hope for the better there be
It exacts a full look at the worst

After the Second World War, a generation of Scottish writers and artists were beginning to see for themselves new connections between art, education, and personal and national wellbeing.

The exhibition of the work of Edvard Munch (1863-1944) in Scotland in the 1950s had a major impact on the young Alasdair Gray.

Gray recalled: “Norwegian Munch was the first great modern artist whose paintings I saw on their original canvases. He died in 1944 when I was nine, and about 10 years later a great exhibition of his life’s work filled at least three upstairs galleries of Kelvingrove Museum. I was then at Whitehill Secondary School and seeing all the great Munchs at exactly the right time.”

Gray encountered Munch’s way of seeing the world as an adolescent and it changed everything for him: “How wonderful to discover the works of a Norwegian artist who had lived in the industrial, capital city of a modern nation smaller than Scotland – who painted it as an area of loneliness and sexual tension and disease, yet saw it as grand and tragic – not boring or trivial, which was almost the worst thing I feared life could become.”

And that’s the point. That’s how art can save your life.

That tough-minded, exhilarating, challenging vision of life as lonely, tense, fraught and tragic might bring not despair but recognition of affinity and strength. That’s healing, of a kind. But it might not be popular. How much of that has been visible here in Scotland, coming from artists and writers of our own?

There are honest, difficult episodes in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s writing. In his first book, Stained Radiance (1930), there’s a horrifying account of a woman having an abortion in London and her suffering and slow recovery, and there are a number of violent episodes in A Scots Quair that are close to the gross social dysfunction depicted in Munch’s paintings, or in a novel like Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) by Alfred Doblin (1878-1957) or the great play, Tales from the Vienna Woods (1931) by Odon von Horvath (1901-38).

All these men were contemporaries. And also in the 1930s, MacDiarmid’s “Ode to All Rebels” comes out with a challenge to readers to acknowledge the unthinkable horrors that are going on all around us, every day:

There are buildings in ilka toon where daily
Unthinkable horrors tak’ place.
I am the woman in cancer’s toils,
The man without a face …

MacDiarmid turns bitterly on the smug self-satisfaction of those who cannot imagine such things:

You may thank God for good health
And be proud to be pure
In body and mind – unlike some.
I am not so sure.

So there’s a sense of the horrors that are always there in potential, and there is also a sense of the values that oppose such things.

THIS comes out forcefully in Lucky Poet, first published in the middle of the Second World War. MacDiarmid visited Vienna in the immediate pre-Hitler years. In Lucky Poet, he says that it was “the most beautiful and romantic and theatrical city” he had ever been to:

“Vienna, full of memories of Johann Strauss and Offenbach, Freud, Kraft-Ebbing, Gustav Mahler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal – the spirit that is celebrated in Berta Szeps’s memoirs, a spirit neither of surface gaiety and indolent acceptance, nor of rigid nationalism and partisanship, but a civilised sense of values, free kinships of the mind, tolerance and a patriotism not so much concerned with domination and glory and aggrandisement, but mindful of man’s individual worth and liberty – the spirit that is today in eclipse over much of the earth’s surface, and has now been extinguished in Vienna itself, where so many of the able and delightful people I met while I was there have now been murdered or tortured or ruined and obscenely put upon.”

Edinburgh, he says, might be bracketed with Vienna in some ways, but Edinburgh never had “what made Vienna a city unique among cities – its indescribable blend of depth and solidity and substance happily wedded to light-heartedness and the ecstasy of life for life’s sake.”

Might Scotland’s capital regain these qualities some day?

In the present context, we might recollect MacDiarmid’s little poem, “The Difference”:

I am a Scotsman and proud of it.
Never call me British. I’ll tell you why.
It’s too near brutish, having only
The difference between U and I.
Scant difference, you think?
Yet Hell-deep and Heavenhigh!

Or as MacDiarmid puts it in the “Author’s Note” to Lucky Poet, identifying with those whom George Bernard Shaw described as “incompatibles with British civilisation”:

“I have no use for the British civilisation in question. Happily events in Scotland are at long last showing that there remains in our people a hard core of this incompatibility, not only unliquidated, but more intense than ever, and expanding and aggressive once more; and it is on that fact that I base whatever hopes I entertain for the future of Scotland.

“Of those elements which are compatible with British civilisation I have no hope whatever.”