MacDiarmid and his Maker

Letters

Vol. 10 No. 22 · 8 December 1988

From Kenneth Buthlay

May I put the record straight with regard to a central point made in Robert Crawford’s review of my annotated edition of Hugh MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man looks at the Thistle (LRB, 10 November)? Crawford endorses my interpretation of the key idea of ‘antisyzygy’, or the combination of contraries, in MacDiarmid’s work, but suggests that I have not taken it far enough: ‘Buthlay might have gone further and included the enthusiasm for strange metaphysical blendings, manifested by MacDiarmid’s early admirer Herbert Grierson. The Edinburgh professor’s work had recently prompted Eliot’s celebration of poetry censured by Dr Johnson for having “the most heterogeneous ideas … yoked by violence together”.’ The fact is, however, that in my study of MacDiarmid published in 1964 and again in an expanded edition in 1982, I dealt quite specifically with that aspect of the case as follows: ‘The idea of antisyzygy … accommodates the recent (in 1926) rediscovery of the wit of Donne (defined by Johnson as discordia concors, in which “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”) … “Of wit, thus defined,” as Johnson said of the 17th-century Metaphysical poets, MacDiarmid had “more than enough”; and it was by this apparently roundabout route that certain characteristics of A Drunk Man fitted in with the contemporary revival of Donne and the other Metaphysicals.’

Kenneth Buthlay
Glasgow

Vol. 11 No. 1 · 5 January 1989

From William Milne

MacDiarmid may be ‘the countryman of a number of more recent poets’ (LRB, 10 November), but I’m sure that if he were alive today he would not waste his time or energy leaving Biggar to visit ‘the tactician of Little Sparta’ nearby; nor, for that matter, would the ‘tactician’ visit the Lucky Poet himself. Has Robert Crawford forgotten that in 1962 MacDiarmid tarred and feathered Hamilton Finlay as one of ‘the ugly birds without wings’, pecking back at Finlay’s cheeps about MacDiarmid’s ‘anachronistic propaganda’, and ‘everyone under the age of forty being bored stiff by Mr MacDiarmid’, with squawks of ‘old hat, barbarism, villainy and ignorance’? Perhaps these statements could also be set in discrete concrete blocks – one in Little Sparta, the other in Biggar? – the issue of which set where to be decided on by the Scottish Arts Council?

William Milne
London SW18

Vol. 11 No. 2 · 19 January 1989

From Robert Crawford

I admire Kenneth Buthlay’s pioneering work on MacDiarmid, and have profited from it. He is right to point out (8 December 1988) that he drew attention in an earlier book to a link between the revival of interest in the Metaphysical poets and the idea of antisyzygy. I persist, though, in thinking that this might have been mentioned with advantage in his introduction to the book which I was reviewing. If Buthlay’s scholarly edition of A Drunk Man looks at the Thistle wins the wide audience which it deserves, then much of that audience will have scant knowledge of Scottish literature. Mention of Herbert Grierson as an Edinburgh figure whose work occasioned Eliot’s essays on ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, and who became an early admirer of MacDiarmid’s verse, might have helped flesh-out and clarify links suggested between the notion of the ‘Caledonian antisyzygy’ (which students often find strange) and other much more familiar Modernist concepts. I think this would have made Kenneth Buthlay’s fine introduction a little more useful.

William Milne (Letters, 5 January) asks if in aligning MacDiarmid with Ian Hamilton Finlay I had ‘forgotten’ that the two men quarrelled noisily. I hadn’t forgotten. In fact, I regretted in the penultimate paragraph of the same review that Alan Bold’s biography of MacDiarmid gives ‘no mention, for instance, of those quarrels with younger writers such as Ian Hamilton Finlay’. In concluding my piece by aligning the geographical near-neighbours MacDiarmid and Hamilton Finlay, suggesting that each was a ‘courageous, controversial and embattled artist’ whose work suggests that ‘THE PRESENT ORDER IS THE DISORDER OF THE FUTURE,’ I was aiming to provoke a little more than William Milne’s letter.

While there is enjoyment to be gained from the sparky flytings whose Rotoruan intensity has warmed Scotland’s creative parts during our century, there is little point in merely replaying them. It is as useful today to praise MacDiarmid at the expense of Hamilton Finlay as it would have been in 1926 to pay pious homage to Stevenson while dismissing MacDiarmid as an obscure charlatan. Surely it’s more difficult and more valuable to try and see such very different Scottish artists as part of the same complexly-braided, potently impure cultural tradition. My aligning of MacDiarmid and Hamilton Finlay was neither forgetful nor, I hope, daft. Both are Scottish artists who delight in reprocessing pre-existing texts; both are spikily individual major Scottish artists often more highly regarded outside Scotland than inside it; both are artists fascinated by, and embattled with, structures of authority, and each makes that an important subject of his own art. These seem to me reasons for provocatively juxtaposing MacDiarmid and Hamilton Finlay, rather than simply accepting their own splendidly vituperative denunciations of each other. If we care about the burgeoning of modern Scottish culture then the Little Spartan adult’s garden of verses and MacDiarmid’s thrawnly cultivated thistles might well be worth relating.

Robert Crawford
University of Glasgow

From Ian Hamilton Finlay

The unpleasantness of William Milne’s letter on myself and Hugh MacDiarmid would not have been too much modified if he had mentioned the issues which produced the thirty-year-old invective which he quotes for your readers. These were – in brief – the question as to whether it was worth publishing such then little-known poets as Paul Celan, Augusto de Campos, Robert Creeley, Louis Zukofsky, and whether it was a crime against culture to write in the Glasgow dialect. Both issues have (I believe) been resolved, and I will not say which side I was on, and which Hugh MacDiarmid. One point should be made clear: it was not for Mr Milne, sneering on the sidelines, to say what I feel about Hugh MacDiarmid, or what the late Hugh MacDiarmid came to feel about me.

Ian Hamilton Finlay
Little Sparta, Dunsyre, Lanark