ECOLOGICAL THEMES IN THE POETRY OF ALASDAIR MACLEAN AND WILLIAM NEILL.
“At heart no flyer, I bristle timidly when touched.
When the ice comes I retreat beneath it.
I choose at last hedgehogs.”
Thus Alasdair Maclean ends his poem ’Hedgehogs and Geese’ in his first published book of poems ‘From the Wilderness’ which has ‘Poetry Book Society Choice’ and ’Royal Society Literature Award Winner’ stamped firmly on the cover. Now, some twenty years later (1995)his profile is almost non-existant in Scottish let alone ’English’ literary terms. The only recent articles about him have unfortunately been obituaries. How did a writer who was once this prominent fall into this kind of neglect and how does his career compare with that of another neglected writer William Neill?
In the above poem Maclean seems to be adopting the persona of the hedgehog, prickly, defensive and secretive possibly as a barrier against not only literary criticism but his own emotional states. It is hard to unravel the true facts of his life from the ‘fictionalising‘ which he himself describes on the cover of ‘From the Wilderness’:-
” In their recounting of incident..( these poems) are almost wholly fiction” and yet a more place—centred poet than Maclean with his focus on the passing of the crofting way of life in Ardnamurchan is hard to imagine.His complete published work stretches to just three volumes. Two books of poetry ‘Wilderness’ and ‘Waking the Dead’ and ’Night falls on Ardnamurchan’ an elegy to the end of the crofting way of life based on his father’s journals. Apart from some reviewing for the Listener, some variant poems and uncollected works in poetry magazines such as Lines Review and one brief assessment of his work by Robin Fulton this seems to be the extent of his life’s work. It is possible that other works may emerge but so far this has not happened. How much his ’prickliness’ affected his reputation is hard to gauge but the poem
‘At the Edinburgh Festival’ leaves us in no doubt about his opinion of literary posturing. This does not, however, justify his current neglect. His poetry received both praise and criticism when published but still stands up as a strong and individual statement with perhaps wider ’ecological’ import now than when first written.
In William Neill’s work on the other hand we find a consistent rather than spasmodic output of poetry in not one but three languages, English, Scots and Gaelic. A mature student like Maclean of roughly the same age who had also travelled the world (with the RAF as opposed to Maclean‘s merchant navy career) he is never the less a more combative and forthright poet of specifically ‘Scottish’ qualities and a fierce defender of Scotland’s‘cultural’ bedrock. In place of the psychological ’shades’ of Macleans work we find instead a writer who rises to the political and ecological destruction of Scotland with fierce words rather like a goose defending its ’Ayrshire Farm'( one of Neill’s superb early poems). What seems to separate the two writers despite their similar age, rural Scots background, Edinburgh University education and similar ‘peasant-poet’( here I use the term gingerly) stance are those very qualities that separate hedgehogs and geese:—
” Geese, too, retreat before the ice
but south instead of under.
They burrow with their wings.
Down the long tunnels of the skies
they hurtle, talking to themselves,
a conversation encoded by the wind
and by their uninmaginable history.”
“Hedgehogs undermine the winter.
Shrouded in old leaves
They let the edges of their bodies die.
They retreat into their own hearts.”
( Hedgehogs and Geese)
The Hedgehog
It is almost as if Maclean has predicted his own future— a slow withdrawl from early ‘fame’ whilst Neill ( whose life has been far more stable as husband, teacher, magazine editor etc.)
could wait out the winters of neglect and indeed emerge the stronger. Maclean ended what appears to be a lonely life, if the last Chapters of ‘Night falls on Ardnamurchan’are true. in a grey town ( Kircaldy) of scrap metal yards and supermarkets feeling unable to return to the croft at Sanna until
” I do not think I will take that way again, except once.”
The poetry contains hints of the end in the opening pages of the first book. Here the major piece of work is the sequence ’Stone’. It consists of five sections of which the first is an introduction to the area :
” God was short of earth when He made Ardnamurchan”.
Having thus stressed the harsh nature of the physical environment and the difficulty of gleaning a living from it he goes on in parts II and III to ‘folk’ tales which may or may not be grounded in fact. Then he describes his grandfather and his own mortality in the context of that community in parts IV and V. Throughout the poem there is the hard fact of stone linking the passages thematically. There are the pebbles locked tight in the fighter’s hands, the slithers of stone given out by the unorthodox preacher, the image of his grandfather “poised on the hillside like a rock” and finally the description of the beach graveyard with “no stone within a mile of them”. The only freedom from the hard
crofter’s life gained through death perhaps:
” so soft a bed, so sweet and cool a resurrection.”
The metaphor is sustained throughout the poem almost as if he was carefully laying a dry-stone wall and the cumulative effect is of a realistic, fond and yet finally pessimistic observance of a way of life bound by factual certainty:
” From stone you came ..to stone you shall return.
Stone you must be all your days.”
Here Maclean is writing at the height of his powers and the note of communality and certainty he strikes seems to fracture from this point on like frost sundering stone. One anonymous reviewer
in the Scottish Review on its publication described it as ‘antique pastoral‘and the entire volume an example of ‘mere fashion-ableness. It is as well the author of such carping and inaccurate criticism is unnamed as he unwittingly added to a greater body of ill-informed criticism appearing in the London journals. Peter Porter managed to describe him as a working crofter and a Ted Hughes ventriloquist on the basis no doubt of his having written about animals ( Les Murray could use this in an extended version of his essay ’Porter’s Beotia’ as it is a shining example of the metropolis writing about something it does not know!). The best reaction ( for this information I am indebted to Robin Fulton’s article in Lines review ) came from Patricia Beer who apart from damning with faint praise did discern some qualities behind the echoes of at least six other poets. Other reviews seemed to rely on the ‘new Ted Hughes’ jibe and an equally misinformed view of Scottish crofting in equal measure. If this was the price to be paid for being a ’peasant-poet’ then no wonder our hedgehog gathered a few leaves about him.
His next volume ‘Waking the Dead’ appeared in 1976 three years after the death of both his parents. He describes it on the cover as a volume about death –
” the noblest and most profound of the great themes of poetry,”
Unfortunately it is a far weaker collection than the first and much less concerned with the specifics of the natural world of Ardnamurchan. Although it still contains individual poems of great power such as the title poem and ’At Home’ its unity is spoilt by weak poems on jokey or at times overtly ‘grand’ themes ( ‘On being Bald’ and ‘Death in Europe’). The overall tone is one of mourning and dislocation after the energy and clarity of the first book. It is as if the umbilical chord irrevocably cut by his parents‘ death and he is floating away from his true subject. In the editing of his father’s journal later he would try and mend this broken net.
The Goose Hisses
Whilst Maclean was back at Sanna trying to forge a connection with generations of crofters William Neill was teaching at the High School Castle Douglas and editing ‘Catalyst’ the journal of the 1320 Club, whose members included Hugh Macdiarmid, which was dedicated to a preservation of Scottish political and cultural independence. As editor Neill published many poets both published and unpublished and in MacDiarmid saw a great poet who along with Burns:
” tried. through the distinctively Scottish language of their poetry, to reverse the creeping anglicisation.”
Neill’s poetry is a strong defence of his rural past and the values that pertain to it yet he also finds a moral ‘objective correlative’ in the present day Galloway landscape as a bulwark against creeping ‘metropolitan perversion’.The Scots language is simply the tongue he knew as a boy and therefore writing in it is not the intellectual pursuit that others have made of it but a simple expression of his deep-felt Scottishness. A Scotland he described in a television interview with Tom Pow as:~
“.. a country eagerly trying to hold on to what remains of its individuality.”
He went on in this interview to define Tony Harrison’s verse as particular to a part of northern England which was a ‘foreign country‘ as far as ‘Sussex’ was concerned; therefore a Scottish writer had even greater justification to use his native tongue.
Following the logic of writing in Scots he went on to learn Gaelic affirming that no-one who would call themselves expert in the literature of Scotland could do so without first mastering it. This he did in no uncertain terms being crowned Bard of the Mod at Aviemore in 1969 the first non-native speaker to do so.
Subsequently he has written in all three’lieds‘ as the mood has taken him. His writing bristles with defence of the ‘rural’ against the ‘metropolis and its centralism’ which he sees as a ‘perversion of humanity‘ and his prolific verse attacks this problem again and again. In contrast to the overwhelming sadness and dark shades of Maclean’s poetry we find instead a respect for traditional form, brightness and clarity which Neill finds in traditional gaelic verse in contrast to the ’opacity’ usually associated with ’Gaelic Revivalism’. In his poem ‘Fringe’ we find him describing ‘the small people’ and ‘the despised’ as he fires off jibes at the ’magazine-kings in a far-city’ and ‘our governers (who) arrange all things to our supreme advantage’. Mixed in with the polemic are scholarly references to the bards. Investigations of linguistic roots and a valediction of the vital role of writing in the modern world:
” And I am an old man in a fringe country
shouting into deaf ears, saying at the end
what does it matter, remembering mortality?
Then I recall…”
Dante lies under marble in Ravenna
his great monument the sounding words
scattered throughout the world. The userers
only inherit the cold brass balls of Lombardy.”
The Goose hiss rises above the flood of commercialism.
The hedgehog writes one final book..
Alisdair Maclean’s final book – ‘Night Falls on Ardnamurchan- The Twilight of a Crofting Family’
was published in 1984 but details his father’s journals of the sixties and seventies as well as his own visit to Sanna in 1979-80. At once, if compared to the work of Neill, the dependence on ‘correct English’ is marked. For a writer from this area to ignore his Scots and Gaelic inheritance is remarkable especially as Neill proves it is largely a matter of choice. Throughout the book both Macleans, father and son, express themselves in ‘clear’ English with a few slang terms thrown in. Even the highland word for whelks,’wilks’— was replaced in the Maclean house by the anglicised ‘winkles’.In the introduction he states the Maclean’s:
“whose standard in English even yet is probably rather higher than what obtains in the rest of Britain.”
and this from someone brought up on the borders of ‘the heart of Gaeldom on earth.‘ In the introduction he rails against the Glasgow view of ‘comic highlanders’attacking that city as being the centre of all ’tartanry’ and ‘Loch-Lomandry’as if Glasgow dialect was a threat to some pure Highland English. Alistair Maclean was of course born in Glasgow! As the book/journal continues you become aware of a distinct lack of any kind of Gaelic references barring a few place-names which is surprising when the author then mentions that his sister habitually used the Gaelic name rather than the English. Stranger still his sparse references to Gaelic literature. There is but one mention of Alasdair Mhaighstir Alasdair the Gaelic poet of the Jacobite cause who actually wrote about Ardnamurchan( e.g.’Allt an t-Siucair — Sugar Burn ). ln contrast Neill dedicates an entire poem ’ In Memorium.’which begins ‘Great Alasdair of Clan Macdonald, chief singer of the Scots..’. Maclean studied ’Eng1ish Literature‘ at Edinburgh University, Neill studied ‘Celtic Studies’ which included Gaelic, Manx, Welsh and Irish.
At this time English Literature have meant exactly that and the family journals reveal a family insistence on correct speaking and reverence for education which seems to have blocked the poets access to wider linguistic and emotional fields. I wonder how his career would have developed if he had studied Celtic Studies instead. Possibly we would have more than the slight collected works carved out of those Sanna gales.
Goose Flys
In direct contrast to his elegies to a dying way of life and the abscence of any naming of place in Maclean‘s work we have Neill’s ’Map-Makers’ poem from the beginning of his volume ‘Wild Places’. Here the responsibility for the mutation of original Gaelic place-names into anglicised hybrids and distortions is set fairly at the feet of;
” The cold men in the city … slaying the history
of a thousand years in the hour between lunch
and catching the evening train.”
Finally the work of these two poets can be defined as being essentially ‘out-of-synch‘ with their time when written but as time passes new connections and echoes can be discovered and in the case of Neill whole new areas open up.
The Hedgehog hides
In Maclean’s work there is a very strong nature-poet at work who ill deserves the poor-man’s Ted hughes tag. Within his books there are strong echoes of the work of American nature/green poets such as Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder who show a similar concern for the ’Wilderness”. The overall tone is still one of sadness though and the poet’s ’swan-song’ is a 1989 t.v. programme in which Maclean returns to Sanna and wanders around the deserted crofts as an actor reads his poems.
The last glimpse of him is of an essentially shy but gentle man standing ill at ease at the back of the little tin church unable to fully fit in with his surroundings. He remains an outsider to the end. As a writer he skirted the fringe of his own life and felt the cleverness of writing set him apart from his origins.
The Goose
Neill has both physically and mentally travelled the greater distances perhaps. He has taken his bomb aimer navigator’s eye to the current map of Scotland and not liking what he sees has started re-drawing the boundaries to his own liking. His defence of the local and individual strikes a chord with many modern writers concerned with defending the periphery against the corrupting centre whether it be rural Omaha, the Caribbean, the autonomies of Spain or the various cultural divisions within the British lsles. Like Maclean there is a strong ’Green‘ message implicit within his work and correlations with the American poets mentioned earlier are obvious. He has written on at least oneoccaision directly for a tree-renewal project ‘Tree Speik’(1996) and references to the spiritual reservoir of the Galloway landscape abound in his verse. He has also more recently become engaged in a dialogue with the Californian poet Dana Gioia about the very nature of contemporary poetry in which he is very firmly on the side of ‘playing tennis with a net’ i.e. craftsmanship and formal as opposed to ‘lazy’ free-verse. His is a body of work which is moving forward and growing (1995)and, whilst Macleans remains very much as a marker to a particular past, seems to be increasingly relevant to our modern dilemmas. As I write protesters against the M77 extension from Glasgow are physically defending those values that William Neill defends with words. The last word goes to Alisdair Maclean :
” I believe the wilderness to be where the human
spirit draws its strength from.
( without it )
I think the result will be a generation or two
of urban poetry then silence.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berry. Wendel. “A Secular pilgrimage”in Hudson Review Vol.XxlII Rpt.in Western Man and Environmental Ethics ed.Ian Barbour. Addison Wesley.1973.
Crawford, Robert. Devolving English Literature Oxford:Clarendon Press 1992.
Fulton, Robin. Contemporary Scottish Poetry Edinburgh: Macdonald Publishers 1974.
Gioia, Dana. “Interviewed by Robert McPhillips” VerseVol.9,No.2 Summer 1992.
Maclean, Alasdair.
From the Wilderness.London:Victor Gollancz Ltd 1974.
Waking the Qead. London:Victor Gollancz Ltd. 1976.
Night falls on Ardnamurchan.London:Victor Gollancz Ltd.1984.
Highland God-Highland Devils Video.S.T.V 1989.
Murray, Les. ” On Sitting Back and Thinking about Porter’s Boeotia” in The Paperbark Tree Manchester: Carcanet 1992.
Neil, William
Four points of A Saltire.Edinburgh:Reprographia 1970.
Despatches Rome. Edinburgh:Reprographia.1972.
Wild Places.Barr:Luath Press.1985.
Selected Poems.Edinburgh:Canongate Press.1994.
In Verse. Video.S.T.V. 1988.
Poetry in English & Scots. Audiocassette. Unbroadcast programme. BBC Radio Scotland.1985.
Fringe.Poem pp.28—29.CencrastusNo.44. New Year 1993.
“Masters of Creative Writing” in Chapman72.
Nicholson,Colin. “Measuring A Needful Path -William Neill” in Poem, Purpose and Place Edinburgh:Polygon 1992.
Thomson, Derek. An Introduction to Gaelic Poetry” London:Victor Gollancz. 1974.
This essay was written in Edinburgh in 1995 for a Scottish Cultural Studies course led by former Edinburgh Review editor and professor Murdo Macdonald. This re-publication is dedicated to him with thanks shame it took 30 years to see the light of day…
Leave a Reply