Quarried from newspapers and journals, in which Hugh MacDiarmid
(C.M.Grieve) wrote under a variety of pseudonyms, this collection -- the
second -- reflects his enduring interests and eclectic range of
concerns.
On the centenary of his birth in 1992, Carcanet launched the 14-volume
MacDiarmid 2000 programme, to bring into print all of Hugh MacDiarmid's
major writings. This is the ninth volume. Launching the series at
Waterstone's, Edinburgh, Iain Crichton Smith declared:
`MacDiarmid had nothing to lose. He had nothing material to lose.
MacDiarmid was very poor for most of his life. There was nothing that
anyone could do to him, and he was in a position therefore to be able to
tell the truth in a way that the bourgeoisie -- many of us maybe,
involved in bourgeois professions -- were or are not able to do. He was
frightened of nobody. Therefore he could be quite ruthless with the
establishment, for the establishment could give him nothing that he
wanted... All he had to protect was his ideas and his poetry and his
genius. . . . He was also, by the nature of things, a very lonely man,
aware of his own genius -- and to be a genius in Scotland must be like
being a leprechaun in a graveyard. . . . MacDiarmid was an open
door.'
It is in writings like those collected here that MacDiarmid spoke most
freely and suggestively. He was unable to conform, to toe the line, to
join committees and groups. Whatever his declared politics (and he
declared his politics in many different ways) he was at heart a deeply
humane anarchist.
