I was born on a croft on the coast of the Pentland Firth in 1932. My mother was widowed in 1941. Within that year, 1941-2, she lost her husband, my father, and his brother, who lived with us (both to pneumonia), and her own brother, a wireless operator, whose ship was torpedoed. She worked until 1968 with no pension, except the old age pension at 60.<\/p>\n
In 1950 I went to Aberdeen University to study English Literature and Language and completed the first three years. In the winter term of 1952-3, I attended David Murison\u2019s Extra-Mural lectures on Scottish Literature and must have heard of Hugh MacDiarmid\u2019s work there for the first time. At the same time I became interested in Franz Kafka and have followed the two strands of Scottish and European (and World) literature ever since. At the same time, or perhaps a little later, I began to read articles from a Marxist point of view, although I wasn\u2019t living in class-conscious circumstances. I started to do some writing. This was the period of the Korean War, the colonial repression in Malaya and Kenya, and the suspension of the constitution in British Guiana.<\/p>\n
At home in the summer of 1953 I began to have a partial breakdown of health (psychosomatic) \u2013 no hospitalization \u2013 and this went on for a few years. In 1955 my mother and I moved to a smaller place in Sutherland and I recovered my health there to a large extent. For the first time, I felt free from pressure. Later I qualified as a primary teacher and taught in Fife, Edinburgh and Dumfries and Galloway.<\/p>\n
I began to read widely in literature. Of the novels I read at that time, I expect the works of Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Sholokhov would most stand rereading. I also read the trilogies of Konstantin Fedin and Alexei Tolstoy. When Dr.<\/abbr> Zhivago<\/cite>, Lolita<\/cite> and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich<\/cite> were published I read these as well. MacDiarmid published some of the Zhivago<\/cite> lyrics in The Voice of Scotland<\/cite> and introduced a selection of Pasternak\u2019s work in a translation by his sister, Lydia Pasternak Slater (she moved to Britain before the Second World War).<\/p>\n The poets I read at that time were Christo Botev, the national poet of Bulgaria, in Paul Eluard\u2019s French translation; Nicola Vaptsarov, also Bulgarian, who was shot by the Fascists; Martin Carter of (then) British Guiana, whose Collected Poems and Selected Prose, University of Hunger<\/cite>, was published in early 2006; and Nazim Hikmet, who is now regarded as the major poet of Turkey in the last century. I also became aware of Louis Aragon\u2019s poetry in 1956, through his weekly paper, Les Lettres Francaises<\/cite>; and then read two of his 6 volume series, Les Communistes<\/cite>, and other novels in French. I still have a copy of a letter from Collet\u2019s, listing eight volumes of Antonio Gramsci in Italian. Some of the other writers in whom I became interested at this time will emerge during my answers. I read the early works of Alan Sillitoe and Arnold Wesker, nearly all Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, and at least one each of John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Erskine Caldwell and James T. Farrell.<\/p>\n How would you describe yourself in political terms?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n A non-Party Socialist, since the dissolution of the CPGB<\/acronym><\/p>\n What do you see as the significance of the literary side of politics?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Politics is part of the public life of the times and it should be recreated as an important aspect of culture.<\/p>\n You see 1991 as forming a break in a certain period of literary politics. Why is this?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n 1991 witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Communist Party of Great Britain. It\u2019s the end of an era in that sense, but not the end of other Communist Parties. It\u2019s much more difficult to say how this affects the literary side of politics. The Portuguese Communist, Jose Saramago, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, for example.<\/p>\n You see Hugh MacDiarmid as the most important literary figure in Scotland in the 20th century. Why is this?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n MacDiarmid was a great lyrical and satirical poet and he was also a national regenerator through his anti-imperialist writing. He had enormous influence on other people, mostly when they were young and this influence extended to the worlds of art, music, history, language, philosophy, politics and economics as well as imaginative literature. He made the greatest single-handed contribution to ensure that Scotland would not be, as in the line from Tom Buchan\u2019s poem, a For freedom means that a lad or lass I never set een on a lad or a lass (Complete Poems, 1, pp. 257-8, Hugh MacDairmid, Manchester, 1993.<\/cite>)<\/p>\n MacDiarmid was at the centre of a number of political and literary controversies<\/strong><\/em>:<\/p>\n a. His alleged Scottish fascist past<\/strong><\/p>\n b. The \u2018bomb London\u2019 poem from the Second World War(On the Imminent Destruction of London, in The Revolutionary Art of the Future \u2013 Rediscovered poems by Hugh MacDairmid, edited by John Manson, DorianGrieve and Alan Riach, Manchester, 2003.<\/cite>)<\/strong><\/p>\n c. His \u2018flytings\u2019 with Hamish Henderson and Ewan MacColl.<\/strong><\/p>\n What are your views on these particular issues?<\/strong><\/p>\n MacDiarmid was never a Fascist in the sense of a supporter of a right-wing dictatorship; he didn\u2019t belong to a Fascist group, for example. A study of his article in The Scottish Nation (1923)<\/cite>, Programme for a Scottish Fascism<\/cite>, shows that he saw \u2018a Scottish Fascism\u2019 as Nationalist –<\/p>\n ‘Scotland First’ for us as it was ‘Italy First’ for them\u2019 – and Socialist – ‘… a Scottish Nationalist Socialism … will restore an atmosphere in which the fine, distinctive traits and tendencies of Scottish character which have withered in the foul air of our contemporary chaos, will once more revive.’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n He thought that Fascism understands the immense social importance of land, hence it condemns absentee and unproductive possession, which leaves vast tracts of land uncultivated that could be highly productive.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (Hugh MacDiarmid: Selected Prose, pp. 34-8, Alan Riach, editor, Manchester, 2000.<\/cite>)<\/p>\n Obviously, MacDiarmid thought this kind of \u2018fascism\u2019 could be applied to the Scottish Highlands but he failed to give weight to the fact that the Peasant Leagues were being broken up in Italy at this time. At the time MacDiarmid wrote the article he was a member of the Scottish Home Rule Association, the ILP<\/acronym> and the No-More-War Movement through the League of Nations. He was also becoming interested in Social Credit.<\/p>\n Similarly, MacDiarmid took ideas from Wyndham Lewis\u2019s book on Hitler (1931) which seemed to chime with his own.<\/p>\n Hitler\u2019s \u2018Nazis\u2019 wear their socialism with precisely the difference which post-socialist Scottish nationalists must adopt. Class-consciousness is anathema to them, and in contradistinction to it they set up the principle of race consciousness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (The Caledonian Antisyzygy and the Gaelic Idea in Essays of Hugh MacDiarmid, Duncan Glen, editor, London, 1969.<\/cite>)<\/p>\n He takes over the concept of \u2018Blutsgefuhl\u2019 or \u2018blood feeling\u2019. He equates Hitler\u2019s attacks on \u2018Leihkapital\u2019 (loan capital) with Major Douglas\u2019s (the main advocate of Social Credit). MacDiarmid was very impulsive and often wrote reviews and articles in great haste. MacDiarmid was certainly deceived by Hitler as a man in 1932-3.<\/p>\n Here are some quotations from his Free Man<\/cite> articles At the Sign of the Thistle<\/cite>:<\/p>\n In view of the recent discussion in Scotland of the necessity of militant action, readers should carefully weigh what [the poet] Mr [John] Gawsworth says:- b. MacDiarmid saw London as metropolitan city, the centre of empire.<\/p>\n c. MacDiarmids \u2018flytings\u2019 with Hamish Henderson were public. Ewan MacColl records his private discussions in his autobiography, Journeyman<\/cite>. MacColl writes: Macdiarmid had positives as well as negatives. He drew attention to modern epics such as Pablo Neruda\u2019s Canto General<\/cite> and Hikmet\u2019s Human Landscapes<\/cite>.<\/p>\n Could you explain how you came to persuade MacDiarmid to fully publish his Third Hymn to Lenin?<\/cite><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n On my first visit to Macdiarmid\u2019s house, Brownsbank, in February 1955 I asked him if it had been published in full (one-third had already been published in Lucky Poet<\/cite>). I saw he made a mental note and he published it in the next issue of The Voice of Scotland<\/cite> in April. Almost fifty years later I discovered that it was originally written as part of The Red Lion<\/cite> project (in the mid-Thirties) and that he then realised that it could be regarded as a \u2018third hymn\u2019 – but it wasn\u2019t directly conceived as a \u2018hymn to Lenin\u2019 like the first and second hymns. Although it does address Lenin in parts of the poem it is more of a ferocious attack on the housing conditions in Glasgow and on the modes of thought which allowed these conditions to exist.<\/p>\n How did you discover the material which formed the basis for The Revolutionary Art of the Future \u2013 rediscovered poems<\/cite> by Hugh MacDiarmid?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n In 1990 the National Library of Scotland purchased (for \u00a3250,000) the archive of material which Kulgin Duval and Colin Hamilton had been buying from him in his lifetime. An American University would have paid double. This has been classified into 246 folders and notebooks. As soon as I opened one of these I realised that some important poems had remained unpublished through lack of opportunities at particular times.<\/p>\n Other people had realised this before but perhaps I made a more thorough search than they did and recorded them in typescript. I had made several (more limited) discoveries of uncollected and unpublished poetry and prose on previous occasions, e.g. From Work in Progress<\/cite> in Penguin (1970), now retitled Kinsfolk<\/cite>, and the eight stories in Annals of the Five Senses<\/cite>(1999).<\/p>\n Your house contains many photographs and maps of places associated with MacDiarmid. Do you see \u2018place\u2019 as being important in his work?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Yes. Langholm, his birthplace; Whalsay, where he lived in the 1930\u2019s; and also Liverpool and London. In Liverpool he wrote the poems in the abcbdd stanza (with the truncated sixth line) which he didn\u2019t use before or after, when he was thinking back to Langholm; and in London he began The Red Lion<\/cite> project perhaps because he joined the CP<\/acronym> there in August 1934 and had also just read Allen Hutt\u2019s pamphlet Crisis on Clydeside<\/cite>.<\/p>\n Scott Lyall\u2019s book, Hugh MacDiarmid\u2019s Poetry of Politics and Place<\/cite> was published last year by Edinburgh University Press.<\/p>\n You have also located unpublished Lewis Grassic Gibbon writings in your researches.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Gibbon signed a contract with Faber to write a biography of William Wallace. He never completed it, but I found the first ten pages in the National Library of Scotland. Gibbon presents Wallace, In an important literary\/political debate in the 1930\u2019s Lewis Grassic Gibbon and James Barke seemed to reject a Scottish national identity. Yet MacDairmid later claimed that Gibbon had become a supporter of a Scottish Workers Republic. What is your view of this?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n MacDiarmid may have drawn this impression from his last meeting with Gibbon in Welwyn Garden City in September 1934 but there is no evidence for it in Gibbon\u2019s writing. Less than five months later he was dead.<\/p>\none-way street to the coup of the mind<\/q>. He wrote instead:<\/p>\n
\nIn Cupar or elsewhaur yet
\nMay alter the haill o\u2019 human thocht
\nMair than Christ\u2019s altered it<\/p>\n
\nBut I wonder gin he or she
\nWi\u2019 a word or deed\u2019ll suddenly dae
\nAn impossibility.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\u2026Fascism in Italy must incline to the Left<\/q>. He also quoted The Fascist Movement in Italian Life<\/cite> where Pietro Gorgolini says that,<\/p>\n
[Hitler] is as much a prophet as Mahomet, Mussolini, or Lenin, but he is an armed prophet’.<\/q>
\n(23\/6\/32)<\/cite><\/p>\nCompare the mental calibre of the members of the Scottish Development Council with men like De Valera in Ireland, Hitler in Germany, Gandhi in India<\/q>.
\n(9\/7\/32) The SDC<\/acronym> had been formed in 1931.<\/cite><\/p>\n… it is just this vital force, this resourcefulness and colour which attracts me in Hitler as, say, against the utter nullity of Sir Robert Horne or the horrible local preacherism, writ large, of Ramsay MacDonald.<\/q>
\n(3\/9\/32)<\/cite><\/p>\nI agree with Hitler in one thing – probably the only thing in which I do agree with him at all – and that is his doctrine that action must not negate propaganda.<\/q>
\n(4\/11\/33)<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\nSo why had he chosen to single out the folk revival as a special target for his venom? Because of the kailyard, the nineteenth century parochialism which had poisoned Scots literature and condemned it to a debilitated existence in the cabbage patch. MacDiarmid had rescued it and, with the help of a talented band of devotees, restored it to its proper role. And now it was being threatened again by vandals calling themselves folk-singers, by a movement which had within it seeds which, if allowed to germinate, would produce such a crop of weeds that the kailyard would triumph again. MacDiarmid\u2019s fears were not entirely unfounded.<\/q>
\n(Journeyman, an autobiography by Ewan MacColl, pp. 284-5, Ewan MacColl, London, 1990.<\/cite>)<\/p>\n![\"MacDairmid:](\"http:\/\/www.republicancommunist.org\/i\/EL014\/hugh_mcDiarmid.jpg\" "\\"MacDairmid:")
At the head of a force that bore the significant title of the \u2018Army of the Commons of Scotland\u2019<\/q> and that after his defeat at Falkirk,
not again, tell on tale, did the Commons of Scotland gather to battle under their ain folk till the Covenanting times<\/q>.(William Wallace \u2013 Knight of Scotland, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, with introduction Braveheart in Kinraddie by John Manson, in Cencrastus, no. 61.<\/cite>)<\/p>\n