The International Companion to Edwin Morgan ed. by Alan Riach, and: The Midnight Letterbox: Selected Correspondence, 1950–2010 Edwin Morgan (review)

Called ‘a companion to a life’s achievement’ in its introduction, The International Companion to Edwin Morgan is a superb collection of essays, one that readers and scholars of his poetry will be glad to read and read again. The word ‘international’ in its title convinces us that Morgan, as has been said, ‘belongs to the world’, and indicates that its contributors enjoy world-wide reputation in their fields. However, a third possible implication of the term becomes devoid of meaning: the lack of foreign contributors tips the scales in favour of the export of ideas, and readers with an interest in international perspectives on Morgan’s work should look elsewhere.

Alasdair Gray’s likeable portrait of a likeable man adorns the front cover of this handy volume which compiles essays by some heavyweights of Scottish literary criticism, like Alan Riach, James McGonigal and Cairns Craig, providing the strongest contributions. Riach adds Walt Whitman to the list of American poets known to have had a bearing on Morgan, though unlike Whitman the individualist, he strove for being a part of whatever it was that pointed towards the future. McGonigal looks at how pre-war parapsychological theories inspired Morgan’s recurring figure of the observer, and gave rise to his ideas of multiple space-time. He shows that translation, too, is space-time travel and, running alongside Morgan’s original poetry, it extends the ‘deliberately narrow compass’ of the physical life he spent at one place. Craig offers a fresh perspective on Sonnets from Scotland, a turning point in Morgan’s career: while Morgan’s nationalism seems paradoxical against the background of his cosmopolitan avant-gardism, he considers Scotland’s national past as having potential rather than as one in decline in the context of modernity.

Equally revelatory is Adam Piette’s discussion of Morgan’s space-poems: his objection to the arms race is clear to the eye but so is his awe for the space race and his penchant for Soviet socialism. His position as a World War Two conscientious objector survives into Cold War time, and the space-poems voice his ‘dark suspicions’ about what space will be left for poetry (and scepticism) when space has been taken over by arms. He creates signs out of noise, nonsense and chaos so as to satirise and resist propaganda, and speak up on behalf of people – and (space) dogs.

Throughout the book, enlightening parallels are drawn between Morgan’s scrapbooks, life events, travels, ‘theories’, and concerns as a poet. It was known among his university colleagues that he was compiling scrap-books, which he regarded as part of his oeuvre; Dorothy McMillan recommends Russian Constructivism as a guide to their ‘infinite riches’. Undergoing digitisation at Glasgow University Library, they will be valued additions to the varied sources we have on Morgan. John Corbett and David Kinloch offer sensitive close readings of Morgan’s concrete poetry, the latter using Deleuze’s concept of ‘arborescent culture’ to explain his attempts at constituting immanent meaning in language. Morgan’s intellectual growth took place in the context of life in Glasgow. Robyn Marsack discusses Russian, French and Anglo-American poets of the city only, though Morgan has openly confessed to the shaping influence of Hungarian Attila József’s on his urban poems.

Ernest Schonfield’s discussion of Morgan’s translations from Attila József and Sándor Weöres leaves me with mixed feelings. The Europe-wide fame of József’s poem fills me with local pride, but the way Schonfield treats him and Weöres is displeasing. He piles up clichés, empty statements and errors of fact. His failure illustrates how problematic it is to produce reliable narratives about other national literatures from an international perspective...