Contemporary “Synthetic” Scots

CONTEMPORARY "SYNTHETIC" SCOTS GEOFFREY VVAGNER I T was ill La Revue Anglo-Americaine for April, 1924, that Denis Saurat, then of Bordeaux, first used the word "renaissance" in connection with the contemporary literary movement in Scotland. This has often been thought a rather appropriate locale for the first recognition of a cultural movement that aimed to put poetry in Scots back into the main stream of European letters. In fact there is a reference to a "rebirth" (though not "renaissance") .in the Scottish Chapbook for January, 1923, a periodical published in Montrose by C. M. Grieve. In the next three months, Grieve contributed his now famous "Causerie) columns to this periodical, suggesting a "Theory of Scots Letters" he was soon to implement so vigorously himself as "Hugh MacDiarmid." References to a Scottish renaissance soon followed , both in and out of the country, until in 1926 this literary risorgimento can be seen to have attracted wide European (including Icelandic) attention. The historian of the movement, W. R. Aitken, the Perth and Kinrosshire County Librarian, attributes this renaissance to the general recrudescence of nationalism in minority cultures after the First WorId War. The young poet Hamish Henderson, or Seumas Mor Maceanmig , puts more emphasis on the "growth to political maturity of the Scottish working class during World War I." He instances here the influence of the Scottish working-class leader of this period, John MacLean. However this may be, a body of poetry in Scots began flowing from the indefatigable pen of Hugh MacDiarmid at about this time, in Sangschaw (1925) , Penny Wheep (1926), and the recently re-issued A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (l926L a long poem rather than another collection of short lyrics, and one which most Scots critics rate his greatest achievement. From this date on a fairly typical cinquecento renaissance, if on a small scale, can be traced in Scotland, MacDiarmid being quickly joined in the propagation of its aims by William Power. This renaissance, MacDiannid enunciated, should derive its strength from the essence of everything truly Scottish. Its programme was to include the development of a literature from the vernacular, both aligned with contemporary European te.ndencies and opposed to the prevailing values stemming from London. This would involve, he went on, a revaluation of the Scottish past, especially of the use of the 410 CONTEMPORARY "SYNTHETIC" SCOTS 411 vernacular before Bums ("Not Burns-Dunbar!"), and it would require conditions of political and economic independence, so that all aspects of the Scottish spirit, including the Gaelic, could express themselves fully. From the first MacDiarmid and Power demanded full freedom of expression and complete self-consciousness for their country : "among our main tasks must be a systematic exploration of the creative possibilities of Braid Scots and a recapture of our lost Gaelic backgTound." To this end, MacDiannid began to formulate a theory of "synthetic" Scots, in an effort, that is, to assemble and recover the potentialities of a literary medium that had once been the heritage of the whole country but which is now largely split up into local tongues. As students of Scottish literature know, this term was originally adopted as defining a putting-together, or synthesizing, of disparate elements of language, characteristic of the fifteenth-century makars. Unfortunately it is still taken as meaning simply ersatz. It occurs in this latter sense in Kenneth Rexroth's introduction to his recent anthology of British poetry, published by New Directions, where a proper proportion is allotted, and allotted for the first time, to the poetry of the Scottish renaissance. Rexroth's error, however, is far more excusable than that made in a survey published recently by Alan Ross, called Poetry 1945-1950, where we find the British Council sponsoring the following st!ltement in reference to four mis-grouped and misspelt contemporary Scottish poets: "Nearly all these writers use Gaelic and English with equal facility." The Lallans makars, as they call themselves, have been accused of most things, but never before, I believe, of writing Gaelic. Incidentally, the use of "synthetic" Scots to mean substitute Scots strikes the Scot himself as funny. In the last part of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's trilogy in Lallans (or "lallanized...