Whens the day and whens the hour

It was a happy occasion, but – like the event commemorating Glencoe I was talking about in my last two essays and the spate of memories of September 18, 2014, and its lengthy preludes and long postpartum – there was also a dark, grim and deadly serious aspect to it. This is from the book’s introduction:

“‘Now’s the Day, Now’s the Hour, we must fight capitalism to death,’ wrote John Maclean in 1919. Revolutionary school teacher, communist organiser, leader of the anti-war movement: John Maclean was the foremost socialist in the country, and that year he was determined that a revolution in the British isles must be begun to defend the revolutions in Russia and Germany.

READ MORE: A lost decade - Scottish independence 10 years later

“Maclean believed a new world could be won and that Scotland must play its part. It is significant that in this call for an international revolution Maclean invoked these words of Robert Burns:

Now’s the day, an now’s the hour:

See the front o battle lour,

See approach proud Edward’s power –

Chains and Slaverie.

“In 1919, as he united his ideas of anti-imperialist socialism with a Scottish communism of the clans, Maclean was deploying Scots Wha Hae to synthesise the Scottish fight for independence with the international class war.

For Maclean it was clear that Edward’s power – Chains and Slaverie – stemmed now not from English royalty, but from global capital. In fact Burns himself, though he wrote Scots Wha Hae as a tribute to Bruce at Bannockburn, had another hero in mind, writing to his publisher that he ‘had no idea of giving myself any trouble on the subject till the accidental recollection of that glorious struggle for freedom, associated with the glowing ideas of some other struggles of the same nature, not quite so ancient, roused my rhyming mania.’

(Image: NQ)

“Burns was thinking not of Bruce, but of the radical republican Thomas Muir of Huntershill who had just been sentenced to exile for the crime of sedition. In Burns’s poetry, as in Maclean’s rhetoric, the Scottish heroes fight for freedom and become ciphers for each other in the centuries-long battle against the hydra of oppression. Each defeated radical passing the flame on to another.

By Oppression’s woes and pains,

By your sons in servile chains!

We will drain our dearest veins,

But they shall be free.

“Maclean too died so others could be free, collapsing one hundred years ago on stage at a cinema in Oatlands, Glasgow. He died on St Andrew’s Day, 1923. Years of hard labour, force feeding, and state persecution had broken him. In his final speeches he railed against the growing threat of fascism, unsafe housing, degrading and dangerous work, police violence, and the hunger and poverty that capitalism forces upon the workers.

“He warned against the endless wars of the coming century that he knew were inevitable if capitalism was not defeated. From our vantage point we can see how prescient and how essential his warnings were.”

In this introduction, Henry Bell and Joey Simons seem to me to spell out very clearly the significance of John Maclean and how it has lasted, 101 years since his death.

A great deal of spurious debate has gone on about how or whether the poets, writers, artists of all kinds had any influence or effect before and during the 2014 referendum.

The argument has always seemed a distraction to me, for it is based on a misunderstanding of what culture is and does, what poets and artists are and do. The best of us are, have always been and always will be, one way or another, enemies of the state.

You might as well lock us all up now. The lawmakers have always wanted to, since Plato. This is why Maclean was and remains such an important monstrance, a permanent beacon of light. Henry Bell and Joey Simons go on: “That those warnings have come down to us at all is due in no small part to Scotland’s poets. In 1948, at a meeting in Glasgow to mark the 25th anniversary of Maclean’s death, Hugh MacDiarmid and Sydney Goodsir Smith took to the platform to recite original poems in honour of the great revolutionary.

“‘Thus as a result of the Scottish literary renaissance which he himself had helped to inspire,’ wrote Maclean’s daughter, Nan Milton, ‘the legend took on a new and immortal form.’ In 1968, she founded the John Maclean Society, and the following decade saw a flowering of activity in the lead up to the centenary of Maclean’s birth, including plays, exhibitions, conferences, murals, radio programmes, school essay competitions, two biographies and the republication of Maclean’s writing and speeches.

“But out of everything, it was Homage to John Maclean (1973), a collection of poems, songs and verse, that for Nan Milton contained ‘the very heart of the legend’. This book builds on that original collection with newly commissioned poems from some of Scotland’s leading contemporary poets together with selections from a wider open call, and from our own research.

“The following pages are a testament to the fire Maclean still inspires in those that wish to rebuild society on a sound economic basis.”

It is this, the longer and deeper understanding of the political and cultural context in which 2014 took place, that is still overlooked by almost all of the commentators, and certainly all of the politicians.

In this sense, all the so-called “opportunities” for “furthering the cause” of independence since 2014, “Brexit”, the succession of villainous clowns in Westminster, the brazen and brutal shenanigans of the wealthy, the subterfuge, plotting, the machinations of treachery in governments: these are all the daily life of public behaviour.

They become so familiar we treat them with weary contempt and many of us become demoralised. But none of them matter a damn. Or rather, they do, they matter a great deal and ought to be dealt with, ought to have been addressed as they have not been, of course.

But when you rock-drill down and take the longer view, the argument that was there before is just the same as it was before any of these things erupted. I wrote it in 2012 and it stays as it was: “There is only one argument for Scottish independence: the cultural argument. It was there long before North Sea oil had been discovered, and it will be here long after the oil has run out.”

The flames are never quite completely extinguished. Even when they seem to be contained, they’re still there, to be found.

Henry Bell and Joey Simons in their introduction to their Poems for John Maclean book continue: “Yet how those flames stay stoked is never a simple question. In English, Scots, Gaelic and Orcadian, the poems presented here take up Maclean and his causes in all their multitudes. He appears at once as historical figure, internationalist, patriot, revolutionary, Bolshevik, free-thinker, religious symbol, tragic hero and a vessel for our own hopes and dreams in the class struggle.”

Among the senior poets, activists and writers collected are Somhairle MacGill-Eain / Sorley Maclean, Hamish Henderson, Matt McGinn, TS Law, Andrew Tannahill, Freddie Anderson, Archie Hind, John McGrath, Alan Bold, George Hardie, Ruaraidh MacThòmais / Derick Thomson, Thurso Berwick, David Morrisson, Alasdair Gray, Alistair Mackie, Sylvia Pankhurst and Claude McKay.

Among younger generations are included David Betteridge, Sheila Templeton, William Letford, Hannah Lavery, Maggie Rabatski, Josie Giles, Alec Finlay, Jackie Kay, Nuala Watt, Jim Ferguson, AC Clarke, Juana Adcock. There are many more.

Henry Bell and Joey Simons make a distinction: “Where the poets and songwriters of the 1970s tended to find in Maclean a kindred spirit in a specific battle to revive Scotland’s independence and its radical traditions, the horizon of today’s poets seems at once more personal and more global. Capitalism is ‘smashing itself to death in competition, strife and bloodshed, driving millions to perdition,’ as Maclean predicted. Yet the great movements capable of overcoming this violence seem, for now, to have receded. Between these two poles, the poet must find their place and change it.

“The task, wrote the Marxist theatre-maker John McGrath, is ‘to relate Maclean’s words to their historical context, but pointing them, by way of their defeat at the time, to the consequences of their non-fulfilment today’. We turn to Maclean not for tactics, realpolitik or cultural renewal but to fully face up to what lies ahead, and to do so without fear or despair.”

Deep resolution is here. This is Hugh MacDiarmid’s poem John Maclean (1879–1923):

All the buildings in Glasgow are grey

With cruelty and meanness of spirit,

But once in a while one greyer than the rest

A song shall merit

Since a miracle of true courage is seen

For a moment its walls between.

Look at it, you fools, with unseeing eyes

And denying it with lying lips!

But your craven bowels well know what it is

And hasten to eclipse

In a cell, as black as the shut boards of the Book

You lie by, the light no coward

can brook.

It is not the blue of heaven that colours

The blue jowls of your thugs of police,

And “justice” may well do its

filthy work

Behind walls as filthy as these

And congratulate itself blindly and never know

The prisoner takes the light with him as he goes below.

Stand close, stand close, and block out the light

As long as you can, you ministers and lawyers,

Hulking brutes of police, fat bourgeoisie,

Sleek derma for congested guts – its fires

Will leap through yet; already it is clear

Of all Maclean’s foes not one was his peer.

As Pilate and the Roman soldiers to Christ

Were Law and Order to the finest Scot of his day,

One of the few true men in our sordid breed,

A flash of sun in a country all prison-grey.

Speak to others of Christian charity; I cry again

For vengeance on the murderers of John MacLean.

Let the light of truth in on the base pretence

Of Justice that sentenced him behind these grey walls.

All law is the contemptible fraud he declared it.

Like a lightning bolt at last the workers’ wrath falls

On all such castles of cowards whether they be

Uniformed in ermine, or blue, or khaki.

Royal honours for murderers and fools! The “fount of honour”

Is poisoned and spreads its corruption all through,

But Scotland will think yet of the broken body

And unbreakable spirit, Maclean, of you,

And know you were indeed the true tower of its strength,

As your prison of its foul stupidity, at length.

And Edwin Morgan ends his poem On John Maclean like this:

Well, nothing’s permanent. It’s true he lost –

a voice silenced in November fog. Party

is where he failed, for he believed in people,

not in partiinost that as everyone knows

delivers the goods. Does it? Of course.

And if they’re damaged in transit you make do?

You do – and don’t be so naive about this world!

MacLean was not naive, but “We are out for life and all that life can give us” was what he said, that’s what he said.

Did he lose, then? Yes, just as we lost in 2014. But then we did not lose, in this other sense, that is also and equally true. The fires still burn. The prospect remains, attainable. There is a line that comes from then, and long before then, in fact, and goes on, will go on past us, into the future.

My contribution to the anthology requires a little explanation. As Wiliam Carlos Williams once said, “You should never explain a poem – but it always helps!”

CM Grieve or Hugh MacDiarmid and Ruaraidh Erskine of Marr were among the guests at the Tailteann Games in Dublin in 1928. At the inaugural Games in 1924, WB Yeats also attended, and the 24-year old Olympic swimmer and Tarzan-to-be Johnny Weissmüller, swam the pond at Dublin Zoo.

Whether the writers saw him, I don’t know, and in the poem I’ve conflated the events, but MacLean’s meeting with Erskine in Glasgow on July 21, 1920, seems almost certainly to have prompted MacLean’s pamphlet All Hail the Scottish Workers’ Republic! of August that year, establishing his move from “British” socialism to Scottish Republicanism.

MacDiarmid invokes this proposition explicitly in the first essay of the first issue of his journal The Voice of Scotland (Vol.1, No.1, June-August 1938, although he had already drawn it up in 1936): “The Red Scotland Thesis: Forward to the John MacLean Line”.

Tailte was the Celtic deity who cleared the fields of Ireland of boulders and stones for future cultivation. She exhausted herself and died as a result. You could say MacLean too was taking part in a similar struggle, as were Erskine of Marr and MacDiarmid: they knew the pathos of the epic effort. This is The Line of John Maclean:

Tarzan in the pond at Dublin Zoo, in 1928,

With Erskine, Grieve & Yeats all looking on –

Grieve is thinking of MacLean, as the water music splashes

On his shoes. Erskine is saddening, time is swimming away.

Yeats watches that slim body, muscular, fast-moving,

White as a fish in the liquid element: darting straight,

Weissmüller young, eight years before the first film starts:

All under the eye, benevolent, permissive, of good Queen Tailte,

Who cleared the fields for future’s harvests: these, her games,

The Scots, the guests; the Irish, hosts, hosting heroes.

All hail the approaching Workers’ Republic of Scotland!

MacLean proclaimed, after talking with Erskine of Marr.

Hail, neighbours! That sharp perceptive twist, in 1920,

That was MacLean. And then MacDiarmid, 1938, affirms it

In and as “The Voice of Scotland”: The Line of John MacLean.

It takes some time to see exactly what a straight line is,

In all the sharp distortions of the water, broken

Up like splinters, flakes and shards of mirror, glass,

Its razor edges dangerous, cutting flesh, and misdirecting vision.

But this one thing comes through, as clean and clear and travelling fast,

In one direction only, like Tarzan through that Dublin pond, back then,

To now, and here, and on: the further destination, thus defined.