Modernism and Nationalism: Literature and Society in Scotland 1918-1939, and: Modern Scottish Poetry (review)

Reviewing Hugh MacDiarmid's first collection of Scots lyrics in 1925,¹ Edwin Muir noted the separateness of this distinctive modernist experimentation: "It is known only to a few people in England, it is probably not suspected in America at all, that for about three years there has existed what has been termed a Scottish Renaissance" (McCulloch, 65). If, in 2004, Christopher Whyte may be able to assume a somewhat wider—if still limited—awareness of MacDiarmid, he must acknowledge, nonetheless, that "the surface" of Iain Crichton Smith's poetry "has barely been scratched by critics" (203), and the same can be said of most twentieth-century Scottish poetry. Yet the changing landscape of British politics, and recent reconsiderations of British literature as not synonymous with the literature of England, are reframing our understanding of British modernism as more complex, varied, and culturally diverse than standard accounts have recognized. Though almost entirely excluded from studies of modern British poetry, the Scottish Renaissance defined a set of interrelated questions and issues debated in Scotland throughout the twentieth century, questions focusing on nationality, identity, language, and poetic experimentalism that, as Cairns Craig has argued, reveal Scottish history and culture as exemplary of the multiplicity and pluralism explored in much current theory.² In this context the appearance of Margery Palmer McCulloch's edited source documents for the Scottish Renaissance along with Christopher Whyte's survey of modern Scottish poetry provides an essential foundation for a more theoretically sophisticated conception of British modernism.

Modernism and Nationalism: Literature and Society in Scotland 1918–1939 brings together a wide array of literary and cultural texts: essays, reviews, journal and newspaper articles, letters, interviews, book chapters. Drawing on a very wide range of authors, sources, and perspectives, it provides a kind of continuous debate running through the years between the wars. Inevitably, with so broad a focus, it consists of excerpts or very short texts, yet it avoids the typical problems of such collections by careful structuring: rather than a series of unsatisfying snippets, the texts comprise nine thematic sections arranged in dialogue with each other so that they serve as reactions, responses, or reconsiderations of those that precede and succeed them. If reading random selections gives the flavor of the period, reading straight through the book creates a sense of engagement in a sustained discussion.

For example, "A Theory of Scots Letters"—in which MacDiarmid calls the Scots vernacular a "vast storehouse of just the very peculiar and subtle effects which modern European literature in general is assiduously seeking"—is placed in the context of a lecture on the vernacular in music, Edwin Muir on Scottish ballads, and John Buchan's counterclaim that Scots can survive only as a "book tongue." Conflicting positions on the nature and use of Scots as a modern language frame much of Scottish modernist discourse. A familiar debate in relation to the poetry of MacDiarmid and Muir, it takes on new resonance as part of a larger dialogue addressing theater, cinema, lesser known novels, and such cultural issues as religion, economics, Irish immigration, or, in the 1930s, views on Hitler, race, and war. For the language debate and the debates about Scotland as a nation are inseparable. Though these debates focus chiefly on poetry, Lewis Grassic Gibbon's trilogy, A Scots Quair—especially in the first novel, Sunset Song—reveals in rich and intense Vernacular the possibilities of a modern Scots prose, possibilities cut short by Gibbon's early death. The Scots Vernacular, Gibbon argues, is seen as an inadequate instrument and is often experienced even by Scots as an alien tongue, but "for the truly Scots writer it remains a real and a haunting thing" (34). With three languages—Scots, Gaelic, and English—Scotland has always been plural and hybrid. Texts take on differing significance depending...