Abstract: This article attempts to categorise Hugh MacDiarmid’s thinking upon the fingers of one hand through the exploration of five emblematic trees from his work, drawing loosely upon Robert Graves’s The White Goddess.

Keywords: poetry, Scots, fictiveness, solipsism, language

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I

I must confess to a certain uneasiness revisiting Poet MacDiarmid as Russian tanks roll through Ukraine, reminding me not only of his decision to rejoin the Communist Party after the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956, but his terrifying, Putin-like question from the ‘Second Hymn to Lenin’, written in response to the Great Purge: ‘Whit maitters’t wha we kill?’ This, it seems at first, is very much a voice from another time.

Moreover, it is so long now since I completed my doctoral study of MacDiarmid that I feel I am looking at him through the lens of a previous self, much of whose thinking also belongs to its historical moment: the post-Devolution defeat, pre-Scottish parliament interregnum of the Thatcherite 1980s.

It is, however, salutary to realise that, as MacDiarmid was fond of saying, watertight compartments are only of use to a sinking ship: understanding how our aesthetic and political histories are always intertwined and ongoing is a necessary element in coming to terms with history – we cannot set ourselves apart as judges without understanding that is exactly what such artists set out to do, and that any attempt to defy that insight will subject us to the similarly aghast scrutiny of the future.

While I was thinking myself back into what was once blithely termed ‘the age of MacDiarmid’, I dug out on YouTube a debate from 1977 about Devolution – also a fascinating glimpse into another era, dominated by Margo MacDonald and Teddy Taylor, not least because we live in a clearly alternative future to the one under furious discussion by the politicians, union reps, meenisters, and landowners involved, but because there in the front row of the audience, waiting quietly, sits C. M. Grieve, AKA ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’.

He’s as tiny and somehow as separate as the Queen, eighty-five years old, in a crumpled suit and dark glasses, red shirt and tie under a grey woollen V-neck; his breast pocket is crammed with stationery as though he were a star pupil, and there are a few crumpled sheets of paper in his elegant hands. He seems to be playing himself in the final scenes in a drama, where his inspiring speech changes everyone’s mind. When the chair addresses him as ‘Hugh’ he takes a few beats to begin MacDiarmidising … then declares his utter disagreement with everyone, and has to be stopped as he goes on to The Dreaded Second Page quoting Muir on – what else? – his own uniqueness.

There is a division of both audience and panel into those who refer to him, usually dismissively, as ‘MacDiarmid’, and those who address him, mostly respectfully, as ‘Chris’. One of the former, with reference to his self-declared ‘Englophobia’, interjects that someone to their left has just muttered ‘bloody English’. The camera reveals the heckle has come from MacDiarmid’s wife, the redoubtable Cornish separatist Valda, her hair vividly hennaed the same hue of red.

Between them, Chris/Hugh and Valda seem to speak from another era still, infants terribles of a time before referenda, trolls avant la internet, where you could say anything because no-one was listening. While the discussion returns to degrees of separatism, MacDiarmid’s own separateness seems of a different order – a matter of how the imagination relates to history through language.

When you turn to the poetry it is immediately evident that this relationship is far shiftier than we might suppose – here are the opening lines of In Memoriam James Joyce:

I remember how you laughed like Hell

When I read you from Pope’s ‘Politics of the Aryan

Road’:

‘English is destined to become the Universal Language!’ [sic]

Although he appears to be addressing Joyce here, he never met him, so this is probably Valda too, meaning that the poem is actually likely to be the ‘Cornish Heroic Song for Valda Trevelyn’ and, anyway, if it’s so funny, why has he chosen to write his epic in English? Might it be because no-one read the several epics he wrote in Scots?

When, several hundred lines later, MacDiarmid asks, with regard to ‘the Eddic “Converse of Thor and the All-Wise Dwarf”’, ‘You remember it?’ the poet Peter McCarey replies frankly, ‘Well actually no I don’t, the author knows I don’t, and knows that I’m sure that he doesn’t either.’

It is on this textually and tonally uncertain ground, in fact in the immediately succeeding lines, that MacDiarmid writes the renowned passage:

Let the only consistency

In the course of my poetry

Be like that of the hawthorn tree

Which in early Spring breaks

Fresh emerald, then by nature’s law

Darkens and deepens and

Tints of purple-maroon, rose-madder and straw.

[…]

And when the leaves have passed

Or only in a few tatters remain

The tree to the winter condemned

Stands forth at last

Not bare and drab and pitiful,

But a candelabrum of oxidised silver gemmed

By innumerable points of ruby…

That so it may be

With my poems too at last glance

Is my only desire.

Here he builds the haws, the birches, ‘the sauch, the osier, and the crack-willow’ – an entire Caledonian Forest of tree symbolism – up into a rare passage of sustained lyrical excellence.

I say ‘writes’ and ‘builds’, but I mean something more like ‘steals’ or ‘collages’, for he is here asserting a whole that transcends all of its sometimes very dodgy parts. And this manipulation of the reader through the reorganisation of language was MacDiarmid’s technique right from when he was plain CMG.

Perhaps the simplest way to explore this is through one of Chris Grieve’s creaky old cranky ideas that nonetheless still seem to be resonant, the Celtic crescent. That the minority cultures of these islands could form an alliance against the dominance of a type of Englishness associated with the major public schools sounds a little familiar. Something like that has been discussed over two of the crises of our time, Brexit and Covid. Except of course, like a latter-day McGonagall, he puts it in the form of the prosodically execrable ‘The Fingers of Baal Contract in the Communist Salute’, of which Tom Nairn remarked:

The ‘fingers’ were the Celtic nations. Cornwall was naturally represented by Valda, alongside Ireland, Wales, Brittany and Scotland […] the resultant clenched fist was mainly for waving under England’s nose. But it was also meant to please Joseph Stalin […] Indeed the longest poem in the world was intended to prove not simply that the Celts were natural communists, but that they had all originally come from Georgia.

(Which was invaded by Putin in 2008, evidently under a similar misconception.)

In the same year as ‘Poems of the East – West Synthesis’, 1946, another book appeared which explored theories about the origins and poetical heritage of the Celts and also focussed on trees and hands. That would be Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, on page 195 of which there is a hand with the letters of an Irish tree alphabet arranged across its fingertips and joints.[1]

This made me wonder if a grafting of Gravesian thought onto the fingertips of the hopefully obliging Baal might be of any use? In short, I propose to categorise here MacDiarmid’s thinking upon the fingers of one hand through the exploration of five emblematic trees from his work.

The five trees are: the burning bush alluded to in the first poem in his Collected Poems, ‘A Moment in Eternity’; the sauch or willow, mentioned above but also featuring in the 1926 collection, Penny Wheep; the ash or World Tree ‘Ygdrasil’ which appears in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle; the mango tree – not a native species – which pops up in ‘Plaited Like the Generations of Men’; and, finally, from a 1970 volume, but composed much earlier, the resonantly-titled ‘My Songs Are Kandym in the Waste Land’.

2

In Annals of the Five Senses, published in 1923, [2] and composed mainly of prose from Grieve’s experiences of the First World War, many strategies from later books are already evident, including the use of dense clouds of quotation shading over into unacknowledged collage, the depiction of a recurrent male character as a synthesising intellect with a saviour complex, and poems which play with Nietzschean paradox and visionary symbolism. Like the later poetry, it is not in Scots, as this has not yet been positioned as a revolutionary Modernist discourse. Reading Grieve pre-MacDiarmid helps us to understand that we should think of ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’, the Scots-writin Gaelic n Russian-translatin Nationalist-yet-Communist would-be totalitarian, as more than a pseudonym, perhaps as something like a heteronym in Pessoa’s sense, who says of his main invention, Alberto Caiero, ‘my master had appeared in me’. In a similar vein, ‘A Moment in Eternity’ introduces our first tree:

I was a multitude of leaves

Receiving and reflecting light,

A burning bush

Blazing for ever unconsumed,

Nay, ceaselessly,

Multiplying in leaves and light

And instantly

Burgeoning in buds of brightness.[3]

While ‘A Moment’ contains more than a few archaisms, we note that, not only is it conspicuous as the first poem in his Collected, it has visionary intent. Graves argued that the burning bush may have been the eastern European mistletoe, or Loranthus, which grows not only on oaks but also on tamarisks, identifying it by its ‘flame-coloured leaves’. He adds that it also grows on wild acacia, which, if burned and inhaled, is trance-inducing. Grieve’s oracular message here may be a key realisation from his most substantial prose unit, ‘A Four Years’ Harvest’, the following extract from which, having once set as IMJJ-style ‘chopped-up prose’ back in the 90s, I am unable to conceive of in any other format:

There was so much to be read

that there was hardly time to think.

How could he digest the marvellous,

the epoch-making truths

which every day put before him!

And the still more marvellous lies!

The war-time lies, the press-bureau lies, the eye-witness

lies,

the lies of accusation and the lies of defence;

thousands of liars, nations of liars,

conscience-impelled liars, and liars for the love of art!

The truth as an abstraction had disappeared.

They might in the dim future again approximate it.

They would never reach it.

In an era of fake truth and dezinformatsiya, we are about as dim and approximate a future as he could have anticipated.

‘The Sauchs in the Reuch Heuch Hauch’ is the third poem in Sangschaw (1925) Grieve’s first book as ‘MacDiarmid’.[4] Like its celebrated predecessors, The Bonnie Broukit Bairn’ and ‘The Watergaw’, it is the result of an experiment with the dictionary, in the sense that words and phrases are drawn from Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary and other volumes. Here, the first line with its undertones of an Expressionist Scottish sensibility, comes from George Watson’s Roxburghshire Word-Book: ‘There’s teuch sauchs growin’ i’ the Reuch Heuch Hauch. | Like the sauls o’ the damned are they.’

This, our second tree, is the sauch or saille, or willow, which Graves identifies as sacred to the Moon-Goddess and to witches everywhere, pointing out that willow was woven into sieves for winnowing corn: ‘it was in winnowing sieves of this sort, “riddles”, that the North Berwick witches confessed to King James I that they went to sea.’ They went to sea in a sieve, indeed.

The fact that this poem arises from a Borders tongue-twister which, like a spell, the poem repeats three times, reveals something of the irrationality behind MacDiarmid’s appropriation of dictionary terms. As he says in ‘Music – Braid Scots Suggestions’: ‘The meanings of words are of far less consequence than their sounds […] their total effects, physical and intellectual, are of infinitely greater importance than their purpose as media of rational expression.’ Most importantly, his entire enterprise is explicitly dependent on an arcane or repressed language being redeployed, remember his remark: ‘the value of the Doric lies in the extent to which it contains lapsed or unrealised qualities which correspond to the “unconscious”’. It is not that everybody knows this stuff, it is precisely that they no longer do, but that MacDiarmid appears to.

If we think of ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’ as a synthetic bard along Ossianic lines, speaking incantations which transcend the exhausted truths and lies of modernity, we glimpse the element of fictiveness in his methodology. In fact, we could assert that Grieve is a novelist in terms Scott might recognise creating a historical fiction containing this character who understands a lapsed consciousness, just without the framework of setting or plot. Perhaps he thought Scotland was sufficiently imaginary as it was.

It is for this reason that writers who adopted his vocabulary sit so firmly in his shadow – ‘clanjamfrey’, ‘eemis’, ‘how-dumb-deid’, ‘watergaw’: this isn’t a living language, it’s an idioglossia, like the science fiction vocabulary which drew him in the 1960s toward translating Harry Martinson’s verse novel Aniara – ‘Goldonda’, ‘Mima’, ‘Yurg’. To use MacDiarmid’s Scots is to fall under his solipsistic spell; it is always to allude, and only to him.

One refrain which punctuates the central sections of A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle like rallying cries to both author and reader (depending on who’s flagging the most) is ‘Yank Oot Your Orra Boughs’. It indicates our third tree, ‘Ygdrasil’, the World-tree or ash, currently ominously subject to die-back. This is referred to at the symbolic centre of his ‘gallimaufry’ in an address to the thistle, redefining the paradigmatic alienated contemporary ‘man’ as a drunken Scot in terms that hark back to the Norse myths:

Thou are the facts in ilka airt

That breenge into infinity,

Criss-crossed wi’ coontless ither facts

Nae man can follow, and o’ which

He is himsel’ a helpless pairt

Held in their tangle as he were

A stick-nest in Ygdrasil![5]

For Graves the link between the ash and Norse myth plays out in terms of the creation of letters: ‘in Odin’s own runic alphabet all the letters are formed from ash-twigs’. The idea that the stick-nest might be a kind of kenning for writing is suggestive, as is the possibility that this is a squirrel’s nest – specifically that of Ratatoskr, who, much like a poet, conveys information/gossip between the tree-top eagle and the root-gnawing serpent. If so, this is echoed in In Memoriam, where in praise of Charles Doughty (praise ‘borrowed’ from a book by Anne Treneer), MacDiarmid compliments his passion ‘for naming particular things | And particular parts of things,’ and gives the instance that ‘squirrel’s drey is better than squirrel’s nest’.

Is it? Or, like all those other weird words, does it just sound like it ought to be better? MacDiarmid’s acquisitiveness in relation to other people’s language is, at root, a search for authoritative discourse.

3

If the spells of forgotten Scots formed one powerful discourse, and we’ve already noted bardic learning shading into academic bibliography as a second, a third is modern media – in poems like ‘The Wreck of the Swan’ we find reportage in the form of doomed radio messages: ‘VALKYRIE calling all trawlers … Old Feathery’s got us at last …’, or, in ‘The World of Words’, advertising speak: ‘Easy – Quick – Sure – The exact word | You want – when you want it.’[6]

But, while the late poetry is famously focussed on ‘the poetry of fact’, it’s important to distinguish that his actual focus is more on a versification of factoids. Our fourth tree is one such instance, and leaves Graves behind. Describing the transcendent consciousness that has been his focus since ‘A Moment in Eternity,’ In ‘Plaited Like the Generations of Men’ MacDiarmid writes

Apart from a handful of scientists and poets

Hardly anyone is aware of it yet.

(A society of people without a voice for the consciousness

That is slowly growing within them)

Nevertheless everywhere among the great masses of mankind

With every hour it is growing and emerging.

Like a mango tree under a cloth,

Sending out tentacles.[7]

That hopeful-sounding combination, ‘scientists and poets’, indicates the sort of grafting that is going on here. It is the same self-validating tone MacDiarmid strikes when, in ‘The Seamless Garment’, he offers to explain Leninism to a cousin working in a Langholm mill: ‘Look, Wullie, here is his secret noo | In a way I can share it wi’ you.’ That he promptly goes on to compare Lenin not just to weaving but to that famous Marxist Rilke suggests that he is trying to weave himself into a dominant narrative that might find poetry superfluous. So too here, where what sounds tonally like a newsreel mingles with that insulting image of his fellow humans as ‘dull cloth’, while the mango’s hidden movements recall the Drunk Man’s obeisance to ‘The Octopus Creation’:

I am the candelabra, and burn

My endless candles to an Unkent God.

I am the mind and meanin’ o’ the octopus

That thraws its empty airms through a’ th’Inane.[8]

That self-aggrandising yet insecure ambivalence toward his fellows, be they family or countrymen or an indistinguishable part of ‘the vast majority’, is perhaps the heaviest charge we can lay against MacDiarmid. His is a Scotland that isn’t enormously interested in the Scottish people, one that would rather contemplate the bog-myrtle, and number the streaks on the harebells. He is so eager to dispense with the bath water of the populist Kailyaird and the likes of DC Thomson’s People’s Friend, that he throws oot the bairnie of a genuinely radical nineteenth century working class poetry, based in the newspapers as set out in the studies of William Donaldson and, more recently, Kirstie Blair and Erin Farley. Ironically, he then establishes in the 1920s a newspaper, The Scots Nation, that he largely writes and quite possibly reads by himself.

Our final tree is the Kandym, or Calligonum Laucocladum, from the family Polygonaceae. It grows across Central Asia as far as Xinjiang in Western China, where another regime which MacDiarmid was keen to align himself with is currently repressing the Uyghurs to the point of genocide.

The tumbleweed-like properties of this tree’s seed appeal to him, and the symbolism of this survivor in the Taklamakan desert is not hard to seek:

Sometimes the sand waves are so big

They bury the kandym nevertheless.

Then a race begins – the dune grows and the plant grows.

The dune grows fast but the plant grows faster still

And by the time the sand dune has attained its final height

The plant is found to have outstripped it.[9]

The poem ends ‘My songs are kandym in the Waste Land’ where the capitals emphasise the parallel and yet the contrast with Eliot: while The Waste Land depicts a shattered world of shored-up cultural fragments, the desert is kandym’s natural environment. Mid-century Scotland may well be too peaceful for him, but he has declared it a desert. His fragments, moreover, are drawn not exactly from high culture but newspapers, periodicals, secondary sources – all varieties of the ephemeral. Late ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’ is a one-man Google, searching before computers for something he can only define as ‘almost everything he has found so far’.

We don’t (yet) know where he got hold of this fact about the resonantly-named kandym, but we can see that, in absorbing it into his poetry, he is struggling against the loss of everything we read and then let go of: other people’s facts and phrases are being heaped up against oblivion.

Late poems like this reveal that, from the outset, MacDiarmid’s work exists in a quantum state of allusiveness, a condition of uncertainty where we are perpetually having to decide whether it is or is not written by him and considering what we might think about where it ‘really’ comes from.

The final twist to MacDiarmid’s solipsism is not only that all these texts end up sounding like – and appearing to be about – him, but that his metaphors end up not only being metaphors for poetry but, specifically, for his poetry. It’s not for nothing that another long late poem is called The Kind of Poetry I Want, and yet there is still a shock in realising that a text which frames itself as being ‘about’ the thing is actually the thing itself: this is exactly the kind of poetry he wants.

The five fingers of Baal do not quite contract into the Communist salute, but they reveal something of MacDiarmid’s capacity for dexterity to the point of prestidigitation – as long as we take him with a cromag’s-fu of salt. In ‘The Glass of Pure Water’, MacDiarmid describes an angel reporting on a hundred years of history, but not verbally. Instead he enjoins us to

Look at the ridge of skin between your thumb and forefinger.

Look at the delicate lines on it and how they change

– How many different things they can express –

As you move out or close in your forefinger and thumb.

[…] the angel’s report on human life

Was the subtlest movement – just like that – and no more.[10]

This image, with its recollection of Keats’s late fragment ‘This Living Hand’, circumjacks or corresponds to what his work is attempting to do at every point, which is – whether through light-fingered collage or dictionary-dredging, epater-ing the nearest bourgeois or dodgy fact-finding – to find the perfect summative and ultimately lyrical gesture.

I started with a still from a film, so I’ll finish with another. In Margaret Tait’s 1964 portrait of MacDiarmid, there is a short sequence of him capering through the streets of Edinburgh. He is tightrope-walking along the kerb or louping up onto low walls wi a droll fag in his mooth, a funambulist without a tightrope or at least not one anyone else can see, a septuagenarian schoolboy, pairt-Chaplin, pairt-Chic Murray, hauf-Hugh, hauf-Chris – all Makar.

This essay is based on a talk given at The StAnza Poetry Festival in 2022.

W. N. Herbert is Emeritus Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Newcastle University and an RSL Fellow. He was Dundee’s inaugural Makar (2013–18). Recent volumes include The Wreck of the Fathership (2020), Unselected Poems, and The Iconostasis of Anxiety (both 2024).