Hugh
MacDiarmid
& Scottish Cultural Renaissance
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Strangely
enough, in the midst of such poverty and hardship, the inter-war
years are considered by many academics to be the source of a new
Scottish cultural renaissance. It was, at least, a revival in
literary terms, led by the poet CM Grieve, or Hugh MacDiarmid,
as he was better known. MacDiarmid’s poetic mission was no
less than the cultural reawakening of Scotland, which he considered
to be, in its present state, a pathetic parody of an older Scotland
dressed in tartan- a collection cultural dregs caused by indulgence
in sentimental notions of Scottishness. In his attempts to encourage
cultural confidence, MacDiarmid thought it necessary to free Scotland
from the yoke of Anglicisation which had effectively quashed any
new and original expressions of national character for hundreds
of years. To achieve this he adopted the use of the Old Scots
Tongue, or ‘Lallans’ as the new form came to be known,
which was a synthetic idiom borrowing from many different varieties
of the Scots language, spoken at different times in different
parts of the country. Although he also wrote poetry in English,
much of his best work is written in Scots, including A Drunk
Man Looks at the Thistle, 1926: an epic critique of Scottish
culture from the rambling, drunken perspective of the poet. The
poem above all shows the vehemence of MacDiarmid's hatred of modern
Scottish culture with all its fawning and twee pretensions in
the face of social deprivation and intellectual barrenness. The
drunken, yet eloquent, poetic abuse is hurled firmly in the direction
of the Burns Supper coterie, with their empty celebrations of
the Scottish Bard, their empty rhetoric, and their almost complete
misunderstanding of the radicalism and egalitarianism which Burns
advocated through his verse. MacDiarmid truly takes his place
amongst the medieval Scottish 'Makars' when he enters this poetic
mode, and would have been quite at home with their tradition of
'flyting' (a poetic slagging between two Makars).
MacDiarmid was a contradiction in terms as a man and a poet. He
was a founding member of the National Party of Scotland in 1928,
but was expelled in 1933 for his extremist ideology. He was a
committed communist, but was also thrown out of this party after
four years- a struggle which is reflected in his Hymns to Lenin.
In his poetics he was a modernist- which implies objectivity,
impersonality, and ultimately elitism- but this categorisation
doesn't fit either and is necessarily tempered by his overtly
social and political consciousness. He found little or no conflict
in being all these things.
MacDiarmid
was a very powerful cultural spokesman who influenced Scottish
culture hugely, yet the popular revival of high culture which
he sought was perhaps a little unrealistic within a largely working
class populace suffering a terrible economic depression. He remained
a cantankerous enigma, and although undoubtedly a great poet,
he was too elitist to inspire such cultural aspirations in the
popular mindset. He often mourned the fact that his fellow countrymen
seemed so obsessed with football (see his poem Glasgow, 1960),
and that people associated Scottish culture with sentimental music-hall
songs, glorifying some never-never-land past, Victorian ‘kaleyard’
Literature, and shortbread tartanry, topped with some hypocritical
poetic celebrations on Burns Night.
MacDiarmid
was protesting against a subtle yet powerful form of cultural
imperialism, and his struggle is reflected in other countries
within the British Empire which also had their language and local
culture appropriated and anglicised. His use of the Scots Tongue
is a reclamation of not only a dying 'colloquial' language, but
the reclamation of a way of life: a mode and rhythm of thought:
a national consciousness. This is a literary manifesto which has
been picked up by many Scots writers both during and after MacDiarmid's
life, whether they agree with his nationalist aspirations or not.
He purposefully set about the establishment of a Scottish Literary
Renaissance, and in a way he was successful. These other
writers include Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Edwin Muir (who later became
a famous critic of MacDiarmid), Neil Gunn, Fionn MacColla, William
Soutar, Sydney Goodsir Smith and Norman MacCaig, as well as more
modern writers like Tom Leonard, James Kelman and Irvine Welsh-
who may all cringe at MacDiarmid's politics, yet still continue
in the tradition of cultural reclamation and the determined use
of localised Scots languages. MacDiarmid may not have achieved
his own stringent objectives to usher in the complete cultural
transformation of Scotland, but he undoubtedly threw down the
gauntlet to later artists to find a new and distinctive Scottish
voice.
