Dear Grieve: Letters to Hugh MacDiarmid (C. M. Grieve) ed. by John Manson, and: The Edinburgh Companion to Hugh MacDiarmid ed. by Scott Lyall and Margery Palmer McCulloch (review)

The three and a half decades that have passed since the death of Christopher Murray Grieve/Hugh MacDiarmid have seen the poet's reputation fall from the heights it briefly commanded in the 1970s and early 80s, and have witnessed the coincidental rise of 'theory' in English departments at the expense not only of concern for aesthetic value but of the cheerful rigours of textual engagement. In Britain and Ireland, at least, the term 'post-structuralist' has placed its entire emphasis on 'post', as demonstrated by the rapidity with which the bright crystals of deconstruction turned in those academic polities to the slush of cultural studies. One consequence of the ongoing degeneration of 'English' is the unprecedented gulf that has opened up between literature as an artistic practice and literature as an object of academic study: if people in engineering departments understood as little about engineering as folk in English departments do about literature no bridge in the world would be safe to cross.

Well, some folk anyway! There are still knowledgeable academics about with pertinent things to say about writing, and Scott Lyall and Margery Palmer McCulloch have recruited a number of them as contributors to their useful MacDiarmid volume in the Edinburgh Companion series. The sign of the dreary times is on the book, however, in an editorial over-insistence on the modernist character of MacDiarmid's enterprise. Though theory bibbers randy for abstraction are likely to be more comfortable with a phrase like 'Scottish modernism' than with the long established term 'the Scottish Renaissance', historically and aesthetically the latter is far more accurate and useful than the former. Not only did MacDiarmid and his associates have repeated recourse to it in the 1920s and 30s, but the movement spearheaded by the poet had a defining concern with re-birth in its attempts to revive energies long dormant in the national culture and to create a non-provincial future for Scotland by forcing open channels of communication with the country's past. In the work of the most formally resourceful writers of the Renaissance — MacDiarmid himself, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sorley MacLean — the impetus towards cultural re-animation took on a specifically Scottish linguistic character that led inexorably away from the 'global' lingua franca of Joyce, Eliot and Pound.

This is not to deny that MacDiarmid was in important respects a modernist, and indeed Roderick Watson's essay on 'MacDiarmid and International Modernism' is the most authoritative in the book, largely as a consequence of the author's immense familiarity with Christopher Grieve's imaginings (to bend a phrase from 'On a Raised Beach'). Watson is careful to warn of problems of definition, though, and of the necessity of distinguishing between 'modern' and 'modernist'. (He brilliantly illuminates the Expressionist character of the lyrics of Sangschaw and Penny Wheep.) Curiously, the most theory-thirsty and modernism-hungry contribution to the Companion — replete with 1980s cod brackets in its title — finds itself rubbing up more vigorously against the unmodernist mammoth in the poet's kitchen than any of the other essays. In 'Hugh MacDiarmid's (Un)making of the Modern Scottish Nation' Carla Sassi is su/ciently perceptive and honest to acknowledge the persistence of varieties of self-portraiture and self-projection across the range of MacDiarmid's writing but remains too loyal to her preconceptions to recognise them for the Romantic tropes they are. The profound and sustained dialogue with English Romantic poetry that runs from A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle through the autobiographical poems of the early 1930s to 'On a Raised Beach' goes without comment in the volume, save for Margery Palmer McCulloch's fleeting and almost...