With an Autograph Letter to the ‘Best-Hated Man in Scotland’
MACDIARMID, Hugh. Sangschaw. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons Limited. 1925.
8vo. Publisher’s dark blue boards, gilt vignette to upper board, spine and upper board let-tered in gilt, in the publisher’s pale blue printed dustwrapper; pp. xii, 58, [4 (testimonials)], [2 (colophon, blank)]; jacket faded, spine sunned, spine ends lightly bumped, a few small chips to jacket at head of spine; light toning; else a very good copy; front free endpaper signed ‘C. M. Grieve (“Hugh M’Diarmid”), contemporary ownership inscription of G. M. Thomson.
First edition of MacDiarmid’s pioneering volume of verse in ‘synthetic Scots’, signed by the poet using his given name and his pen name, with a seemingly unpublished autograph letter from the author (signed ‘Christopher Grieve’) to the journalist George Malcolm Thompson (1848–1933), a portrait photograph of MacDiarmid, and an invitation to his seventieth birthday party.
Thomson was co-founder in 1922 of the Porpoise Press, with Roderick Watson Kerr and John Gould, MacDiarmid’s successors as editors of the Broughton Magazine (1910–11). He had written of MacDiarmid that ‘he has done more than anyone else to put Scotland on the map’ (quoted in McKechnie, p. 137). The year after the publication of Sangschaw, he and MacDiarmid became embroiled in a curious publishing triangle. In a letter to George Ogilvie, his former English teacher, dated 1 January 1928, MacDiarmid writes: ‘Albyn (which has been selling well) I am not proud of [...] About a year before it had appeared I had written to the publishers [Kegan Paul] suggesting that I should do a vol entitled Caledonia: or the Future of Scotland for their [Today and Tomorrow] series. They agreed – and then I found I wasn’t in the mood [...] I kept putting them off. Finally a period of months ensued during which I heard nothing from them. Then I happened to hear that they were announcing a book entitled Caledonia: or the Future of the Scots by G. M. Thomson. I immediately wrote to them – but they said their acceptance of Thomson’s book in no way prevented them accepting mine, written from a different angle – and would I send on my MSS at once?’.
MacDiarmid was displeased at the lack of editorial corrections to his own hastily published work, but Thomson’s work was sent to him in proofs in advance. In a letter to the businessman and Scottish nationalist politician R.E. Muirhead on 16 July 1927, MacDiarmid writes that ‘Mr Thomson and I agree entirely as to the present condition of Scotland and its cause. Where we differ is that while he recognises that nothing but a timely revival of Scottish Nationalism on an adequate scale can avert the calamity of the complete de-Scoticisation of Scotland, he does not believe that will happen – he thinks the time already past. I think otherwise’. In spite of this divergence, he calls Thomson’s essay ‘the most compact, comprehensive, incisively-written unanswerable demonstration of the need for Scottish Home Rule that has yet been penned’ (ibid.); he arranged for his review of Thomson’s Caledonia to appear in the September issue of Muirhead’s Scottish Home Rule, one of over thirty different reviews MacDiarmid wrote on Thomson’s essay and what he refers to in his letter to Ogilvie as a ‘journalistic grand slam’.
By the 1930s, however, MacDiarmid’s and Thomson’s views had further diverged: they clashed in 1934 over the formation of the Scottish National Party (SNP) in 1934; by this time, Thomson was widely regarded as Scotland’s ‘best-hated man’, largely for his alarmist national politics arguing that Scotland was doomed, which he blamed unequivocally on the mass immigration of Irish Catholics to Scotland. T. S. Eliot, in a 26 June 1935 letter to Emily Hale, describes lunching with Thomson to ‘talk about Scottish Nationalism and try to tell him how his pamphlet on the decline of industry in Scotland ought to have been written and he said he would re-write it’.
Their differing political stances evidently did not prevent MacDiarmid and Thomson from establishing a lasting relationship: loosely inserted in the present copy are an autograph letter from MacDiarmid to Thomson, written at Brownsbank Cottage and dated 2 January 1954, in which MacDiarmid discusses his forthcoming In Memoriam James Joyce (1955), an encyclopaedic poetic tribute to Joyce: ‘I enclose, as requested, subscription form for Joyce poem, which is all set up and will be published very soon now. I’ll let you know if I find any MSS still in my possession, but I fear not’. The work was published on behalf of the subscribers, one of whom was Thomson.
There is also an invitation to MacDiarmid’s seventieth birthday reception and dinner arranged by the Edinburgh City Committee Communist Party, as well as a portrait photograph of MacDiarmid by the celebrated Inverness photographer Andrew Paterson (1876–1948), who had photographed the likes of George Bernard Shaw, Noël Coward, Alfred Hitchcock, and John Gielgud.
See Bold ed., The Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid (1984); McKechnie: The Best-Hated Man (2013).
SKU: 2124863