NEXT year – 2023 – will mark a century since the publication of Christopher Murray Grieve’s first book, Annals of the Five Senses.
In 1923, Grieve had just returned from the First World War to life as a journalist in Montrose. Three years later, he published the epic poem A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle, written in Scots under the pen name Hugh MacDiarmid.
It’s unlikely that, 100 years ago, Grieve (or MacDiarmid) knew the impact his work would have. Then again, such an enigmatic figure is wont to dream. In a 1922 article, he heralded a coming “Scottish Renaissance” – a name that caught on as poets across Scotland took up their pens.
Today, you can visit the National Portrait Gallery to see Sandy Moffat’s 1980 painting, Poets’ Pub. It depicts eight men meeting in an Edinburgh pub. Their names might sound familiar: MacCaig, MacGill-Eain, Mac a’ Ghobainn, Smith, Brown, Morgan, Garioch, and of course, Hugh MacDiarmid.
Moffat’s scene is unlikely but not apocryphal. These poets were friends, drinking together at Milne’s Bar on Rose Street. They came from across Scotland: Stromness, Glasgow, Dumfries, Ratharsair; Sydney Goodsir Smith was the only exception, an ex-pat from New Zealand. Nonetheless, he wrote in MacDiarmid’s Scots. To understand their views on Scotland, however, we must read between the lines.
Scott Lyall, Associate Professor of Modern and Scottish Literature at Edinburgh Napier, is keen to distinguish the poets in the painting from the Scottish Renaissance.
“What Moffat is pointing to is just that: a seeming Rose Street culture of literary gatherings,” he told me in an interview for the Sunday National. Lyall explained that Poets’ Pub, while depicting MacDiarmid and the younger poets he influenced, is not representative of the Renaissance.
Furthermore, Lyall emphasised the pluralistic nature of Scottish literature in the 1920s: “The Renaissance is not a movement … it’s a period.”
Although MacDiarmid’s political agenda is well-known, prominent figures such as Edwin Muir and Lewis Grassic Gibbon – neither of whom feature in Moffat’s painting – were sympathetic, but ultimately sceptical towards cultural nationalism.
“So how do we define the Renaissance?” I asked Lyall.
His answer: by its pessimism. Like their contemporaries in Harlem and Ireland, writers of the Scottish Renaissance were critical of their country. Muir went as far as to label Scotland in 1941 a “sham nation”.
“Renaissance movements are looking to recover things they assume to be lost, particularly through a centralising culture,” says Lyall. “But equally: to establish a modern way forward.”
This is the legacy of the Scottish Renaissance: against Anglicisation and tartanry, its poets sought to revive “the true Scotland”.
MacDiarmid did so when he wrote in “Lallans”, his version of Scots. Once the language of an independent Scotland’s government, literature, and church, the Acts of Union marked the expulsion of Scots from public life – or in the case of Burns and Scott, its dilution into a novelty “sub-English” for London parlours.
Somhairle MacGill-Eain, known in English as Sorley Maclean, did the same, if not more, for Gàidhlig. He is, according to the Scottish Poetry Library, “the greatest Gaelic poet of the 20th century”. When Iain Mac a’ Ghobainn (Iain Crichton Smith) translated his poems into English in the 1970s, they garnered international acclaim.
Regarding MacDiarmid’s successors, David Kinloch, Chair of the Edwin Morgan Trust, told me that Morgan was “both a nationalist and internationalist … Morgan believed that Scotland, its languages and culture, could and should stand alongside those of other nations”.
The writers of the Scottish Renaissance and Rose Street never achieved the global status of their modernist contemporaries –Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, or Virginia Woolf. They are ill-remembered in the Scottish popular consciousness, at that awkward stage between the giants of Burns, Scott and Stevenson, and the popular literature we have now with Carol Ann Duffy, Trainspotting, and Shuggie Bain.
Yet that was never the point. As Lyall told me, MacDiarmid acknowledged he was no Burns. He and his fellows were not trying to change the Western world: only a small part of it, the part that mattered most to them. I think, 100 years on since MacDiarmid began his career as a poet, we might recollect his reply to Yeats when the latter claimed for himself the “rose of all the world”:
The Rose of all the world is not for me.
I want for my part
Only the little white rose of Scotland,
That smells sharp and sweet – and breaks the heart.
