In Memoriam Hugh MacDiarmid
I
I remember when I read your Bonnie Broukit Bairn
being so intoxicated
by these strange Scots words,
words like crammasy and clanjamfree,
that I went into the library
and ordered Jamieson's Dictionary of the Old Scottish Tongue
to learn more of these felicities.
The old leather-bound volume arrived,
and I dived into its pages
as into a vat of wine,
to feel its yeast bubbling through my wordstore;
and when I surfaced,
shaking drops from my head
like a swimmer up from the depths,
the new vocabulary like red-scattered jewels
in the sun of my incomprehension,
dazzling my senses,
the whole word pool twinkling in the air
while I took a deep breath
and plunged back in again,
seeking for pearls.
I had some conception
that the languages of these magic islands
might start breeding as equals,
not raped by the dead maw of Received Standard English,
but creating some new kind of post-colonial pidgin,
with scraps of Gaelic and Welsh
and Scots,
and, yes, Cockney and Yorkshire, too,
and the Geordie I'd learnt as a child and all but forgotten,
rubbing shoulders and intermingling,
not creaming down into some homogenised mush,
but like fresh vegetables in a good stew,
not overcooked,
but preserving their identity,
yet lending each flavour of themselves to the whole
– what was the word? –
clanjamfree.
I myself am a ladle of that soup,
my ancestry typically mongrel in this mongrel nation:
my father black Irish, born in Glasgow,
my mother pure Geordie,
I born in Acton
(Krishna Menon used to come and visit)
but learning to speak in Whitley Bay,
my five-year-old shouts of glee challenging the seagulls' cry,
then learning again in London when old enough for school,
back in Northumbria as an eight-year-old evacuee,
and back again to London till a man of fifty-eight,
I settled up in Bradford,
answering to the name Kaaarl.
And working in the cis-Atlantic world of pop music,
acquiring neologisms and black slang,
developing a chameleon ability to mirror the voice
of anyone I was interviewing,
until one day an Aussie subject
asked me where I came from exactly Down Under.
Like all children, I'd been bilingual from the day
I first set foot in a playground,
or even trilingual.
There were things I could say at home (“mammy”)
that got me mocked at playtime,
words I couldn't say in the classroom.
“No such word as can't,” said the schoolteacher,
and when I sang The Internationale,
“and at last ends the age of cant”,
I thought it was that non-word we were consigning to the dustbin,
no more “can't”,
for now all things were possible.
My singing was full of such felicitous errors:
“ladies come out in your thousands,” sang Fred Astaire in The Fleet's In Port Again,
and since beach pyjamas were the latest fashion craze
(and I living at the seaside),
“ladies come out in your trousers” sounded quite sensible to me.
Grammar school added to this polyglotism
as I learned from my Latin that circumstances,
from Rome's circumsto, to stand around,
were not something I could be under
(except, possibly, if grammatical space curved back on itself
like some Einsteinian continuum,
allowing me to vanish up my own orifice
while straying in the same place.)
Even today, expressions like “centre around”
(another Einsteinian kleinbottle)
can give me actual physical pain.
Then there was Geoff Chaucer,
whose pilgrims spoke a strange sort of
Frenchified north-countree English:
“a k-nicht there wass”.
I must have been weird:
while my schoolmates were sniggering over
The Wife of Bath's Tale
( though I think I was the only one who recognised it
as an old friend
in one of Cyril Fletcher's odd odes),
I was enjoying the rich porridge of Anglo-Norman English
on its way to becoming the speech of Shakespeare,
where words like “con-dish-i-on” had four syllables.
I was really pissed off
they wouldn't let me learn Greek because I wasn't smart enough,
yet too smart to learn German,
because that was the way they streamed us:
top intellects learned Latin and Greek but no science at all,
(and this, remember, was a London County Council grammar school,
full of working class yobboes,
who were being trained up for Oxbridge whether they liked it or no),
medium-smart (eg me) did Latin and French,
and a strange mixture called “general science”
(because they taught us no proper physics
I didn't hear about entropy until I encountered
Mike Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius fantasies,
with the result that I didn't come to believe in a Creator,
until many years later,
and only then gave my life to his son),
thickies did French and German,
with the result that my friend Reg
became a world authority on Nietszche,
while I'm still getting to grips with terms like lumpenproletariat
and weltanschauung,
and the truly stupid did only French;
no wonder De Gaulle hated us,
and they still keep trying to ban our beef.
I discovered James Joyce, and the “commodious vicus of recirculation”
of Finnegans Wake,
the (to this Protestant atheist) totally incomprehensible
parody of the Latin mass at the opening of Ulysses,
the latter, as it happened, in the bookshelf
of my Christian aunt, who'd lugged me three miles there and back
to matins and evensong every Sunday;
she gave it to me on extended loan,
making no remark at the greasy thumbprints
all over Molly Bloom's erotic soliloquy at the end,
when I handed it back to her.
I found a similar, and I had thought totally uncopiable voice,
at the same time in Thomas Wolf's homeward-glancing Angel,
where I learned for the first time the real meaning of the “jelly roll”
Sidney Bechet had been saying he wasn't going to give no one none of his
(a conjunction of double and treble negatives Chaucer would have loved
– “He never yet no vileinye ne sayde” –
and is perfectly good grammar to this day in Russian),
the rich rhythms of Gerard Manley Hopkins
and Dylan Thomas's “heron-priested shore”
were extending my verbal horizons
when I discovered Kenneth Patchen
and the first of the beat poets
(it was decades later when I finally acquired his complete works,
purchased in San Francisco's City Lights bookshop).
At about the same time I was staggering my way through
MacDiarmid's Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle,
(and coming across, for the first time, Aleksandr Blok,
translated into Scots:
“I hae forekent ye! O I hae forekent
The years forecast your face afore they went”;
later, I fell victim to the rough music of Blok's The 12),
I was also being bowled over by
the strange synthesis of Salford and Dumfries
in the singing and spoken voice of Ewan MacColl,
whom I heard for the first time on Radio 3
playing Untrue Thomas, in Sydney Goodsir Smith's
radio play about Thomas the Rhymer.
I understand MacDiarmid disapproved of MacColl's infatuation with folk,
seeing him,
as did George Bernard Shaw,
as the most promising playwright of his generation
(funny how no one ever enquired how much of his work,
and of those who followed after,
had been strained through the uncouth beauty of Joan Littlewood's way with language:
would we have ever learned to love Behan, or Lionel Bart,
or indeed MacColl himself,
if it hadn't been for lovely Joan;
and if she hadn't ordered him out of her life
– she was then Mrs MacColl [actually Mrs Miller] –
when she found him in bed with one of the juvenile females
in Theatre Workshop,
I wonder if he'd ever have devoted
the rest of his life to folk
if that unfortuitous discovery
hadn't happened?)
People were talking about tradition,
and at first I wanted none of it.
In music, I was a bebopper
(trad was decried as mouldy fig,
and it took the modernists,
Cecil Taylor and Archie Shepp,
to teach me that black music was a seamless garment,
from New Orleans to a New York loft);
in politics, an extremist;
in sexuality, a hard-on always looking for an orifice;
what need had I of tradition?
It was all that romantic Wordsworth stuff
about skylarks and daffodils that turned me off
(I didn't know about Wordsworth's early support
for the Jacobins of the French Revolution, until later),
milkmaids dabbling in the dew
(I found out later that it should really be “rolling in the dew”,
and anyway, dew was probably a metaphor for sperm),
and Kathleen Ferrier's bell-like tones
singing Blow the Wind Southerly,
with nary a trace of her own natural Geordie accent coming through.
My main man, poetically,
was Vladimir Mayakovsky,
the Russian revolutionary futurist,
who wanted to paint leaves of the trees purple
because green was such a naff colour.
The Italian futurist,
Marinetti,
composed symphonies for machine-guns,
and although he became a fascist,
I could dig where he was coming from.
Later, the noise of Stockhausen
and Pete Townshend's guitar feedback
seemed to me in direct line of dissonant descent.
But the idea of tradition began to rub off on me.
I heard Marshall McLuhan talking about
tradition as “the total past as now”,
Horton Barker pointing out
that having a tradition
and being imprisoned by it,
was two entirely different things.
If MacDiarmid could dip into Jamieson,
as into a vat of whiskey,
and if I could follow him into the same intoxication,
why not dip into my own past and present?
I still know very little Gaelic,
though a cara strikes me as a nicer way to end a letter
than “yours sincerely”,
(especially when sincerity has so little to do with it),
or the “yours fraternally”
that so often ends a letter of uncomradely vituperation
when the left's in-fighting;
though I've been amused to see that in Ireland,
where all street signs are shown in English and Irish,
they have, apparently found no Gaelic for cul-de-sac;
and I know less Welsh,
though enough to pronounce
placenames like Beddgelert correctly.
The other day
a fellow poet reproved me for using an archaism
like “know full well” in a poem,
when all who know me know full well
it's a term I use in everyday speech
all the time.
My language is a full well,
and if I dip deep into it,
I find who knows what joys
in its muddy bottom!
Hugh MacDiarmid
called his method “synthetic Scots”,
not meaning artificial,
but rather the resurrection of forgotten richnesses;
I write today in homage to him,
realising I've been synthesising language all my life,
as I move from south of the Chilterns to north of the Pennines,
as I interview Parisien couturiers in bad French
and speak in North American
to Cajun accordionists who reply in a language more ancient
than the Académie Française can ever acknowledge,
as I enter the Jaberwocky Russtopia of A Clockwork Orange,
where horror-show's a term of approbation,
derived from oroshcho,
(the title of a poem by Mayakovsky, by the way, which the translator called Very Good).
I never met MacDiarmid in his life,
though number many friends who knew him as Chris Grieve,
the Langholm reiver
(or thief)
who raided the past
in service to a future he hailed
in his three hymns to Lenin.
And whose In Memoriam James Joyce
I take, humbly, as a model
for what I am trying to say
in this tribute
to a giant of European 20th Century literature,
who had to take work in a munitions factory during the war,
the powers that be lacking the Soviet intelligence
that literature could move men's souls to victory,
who was kicked out of the Scottish National Party
(which he helped to found)
for “Communist tendencies”,
only later to be kicked out of the CP
for bourgeois nationalism,
rejoining the Party
(some might say quixotically,
but I agreed with him)
at the time of the Hungarian counter-revolution in 1956,
moving away from Scots and back into that strange
didactic tongue the Scots have borrowed from the English
(though so unlike the way any Englishman might think,
except he be a worker on the dole or the picketline,
auto-didacting himself in the library to pass the time),
for his densely argued final poems.
But I still love his Scots lyrics:
“Deep surroondin' darkness I discern
Is aye the price o' licht,” he wrote.
A bonny dialectic.
And a fine poetic statement too.
Praise him!
99-10-26
