Today and from time to time, we'll upload snippets from Michael Schmidt's lectures, essays and other writings for your perusal - we'll call this feature 'Michael's Bookshelf' (the same bookshelf which provides our background image).
This extract is taken from Michael's recent lecture on the writer Hugh MacDiarmid, 1892-1978 (a key figure in the Scottish Renaissance and a founding-member of the SNP) and the time he spent on Whalsay, a Shetland island. In today's blog post, Michael considers the things which MacDiarmid brought to Whalsay, and the things he took away with him.
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| Michael Schmidt |
After just short of a decade in Whalsay, had he taken – nothing at all? His volatile ideologies all required him to live in cities, to be part of and not part of a crowd, to be near a struggle not with nature but with history itself. He escaped from Whalsay from time to time, due to illness or invitation – back to Glasgow or Edinburgh, or even Manchester, and those breaks from exile, those 'rare interludes' as he calls them, were 'like sparkling water in a thirsty land, these coming into relationship again with minds keen, alert, attuned to beauty'.
He continues, 'I had almost forgotten that there were people who had thoughts and could clothe them in words not only worthy of rational beings, but even make them interesting, eloquent.' The people he moved among on Whalsay were cobblers, farmers, butchers, fishermen. They knew instinctively the weather and season, they belonged to a different world that he claimed to respect and admire but in which he did not really belong except as a tourist. They seem to loom out of a pre-proletarian past, the agrarian world that his politics knew needed to be changed utterly before the larger transformation of society could begin.
He continues, 'I had almost forgotten that there were people who had thoughts and could clothe them in words not only worthy of rational beings, but even make them interesting, eloquent.' The people he moved among on Whalsay were cobblers, farmers, butchers, fishermen. They knew instinctively the weather and season, they belonged to a different world that he claimed to respect and admire but in which he did not really belong except as a tourist. They seem to loom out of a pre-proletarian past, the agrarian world that his politics knew needed to be changed utterly before the larger transformation of society could begin.
As I re-read the work, I was surprised how little related to or was rooted in the place, its particulars, its people. When I started to settle in Britain a few decades ago I wrote to George Steiner to say I was at last putting down roots. He replied that as a Jew he had discovered early on that he had legs, not roots. Here I was trying to turn Hugh MacDiarmid into a plant where he was in fact a man; into an immigrant where he was in fact a displaced native. His Whalsay work seldom took Shetland as its specific narrative setting; the landscape of imagination, when it informs a poem, remains the Langholm of his youth that neither time nor travel could erase. But the movement of his imagination is towards generality, despite the vivid precision, or pseudo-precision, of his diction. After he left Shetland there are few backward glances; he does not share the nostalgia his son felt for the place that gave him a vivid boyhood. Michael grew up a native and when he left at the age of ten it had become the only world he knew; he had something like Edwin Muir’s experience of permanent exile from a beloved landscape; of a lost idyll, a fall from grace.
Michael Schmidt is Professor of Poetry at the University of Glasgow, where he is also convenor of the Creative Writing M Litt Programme. He is a founder and the Editorial and Managing Director of Carcanet Press and founder and general Editor of PN Review. He has published several collections of poems, two novels, a number of anthologies and volumes of literary history, and two books of translations. Most recently he has co-edited the newest of Carcanet's New Poetries anthologies.
Carcanet publishes all of Hugh MacDiarmid's work. See the full range at Carcanet.co.uk
