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A Man In My Position: Remembering Norman MacCaig

James Bell

What took me back to thinking about Norman MacCaig were two short elegies published in Poetry Scotland and written by W.N. Herbert and Angus Calder. Although a Scot my personal links with Scotland have loosened since the mid-1990s. I knew MacCaig had died in 1996 so was initially surprised to see these poems published in 2000, nearly five years after his death.

This is when I got to thinking and started looking at things from a Scottish perspective again. The wider media largely ignores what happens in Scotland unless it is tragic or has other widespread implications such as a Scottish Parliament. It is therefore difficult to get a handle on the depth of a sense of nationhood that exists for someone whose blood was not bred in Scotland. Scots do become the archetype on occasions that the outside world assumes exists all the time - a sort of Brigadoon crossed with Silicon Glen and all the shortbread tin lid trappings that go with the imagery.

In order to remember Norman MacCaig it was necessary to travel that byway for a moment to draw a brief sketch of a different world beyond a guttural accent that rolls its Rs. MacCaig was not of that type. His accent was distinctly Scottish but had a certain refined Edinburgh burr that would tell any native of the city the part in which he lived. His home was in one of the better grey stone buildings that characterise the city and in Scotland are called a tenement, much of late Victorian ancestry. The buildings still exist because they were built to last and housed much of the lower middle classes and high earning artisan class. They also housed some of the professions, such as teachers, which was MacCaig's job for forty years as a primary teacher. If you listen, and I can still hear his voice now, you find a deceptive simplicity in his mostly short poems. Both MacCaig and myself share the cityscape of Edinburgh as a background.

When you have a day job not related to the art you love and practice a natural tension is thrown up. Poems can look pithy and unfinished in the first flush of inspiration. MacCaig, like myself, was prolific, which meant that much was left unpublished. Indeed, Douglas Dunn in his introduction to MacCaig's posthumous Selected Poems talks of him appearing to write a poem every day. Yet MacCaig rye and dryly satirical in life as in his poems was also circumspect. Although much of what has not been seen is up to standard I believe MacCaig would have disliked repeating himself, which appears to be the main reason for not bringing them out. His reputation in Scotland is huge an icon says Dunn. As a Scot, a poet and sitting with the said Selected beside me as I write I cannot refute that sentiment just as I understand the natural tension.

Scotland is a small country with a strong capacity for loving its home grown literature. Following the revival of Scots or "Lallans" as a literary language in the 1920’s by Hugh MacDairmid we haven’t looked back as the story goes. Many would agree that Scotland has three languages: Gaelic, Lallans and English. The latter two are from related roots while the first is not. I had a grandfather who spoke Gaelic just as MacCaig had similar ancestry but neither of us spoke a word.

MacCaig wrote in English. As I heard him say many times, it was the language he spoke. He and MacDairmid were friends and would "foregather" with other poets such as the Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean, Ian Crighton Smith (who wrote both in English and Gaelic) and Sydney Goodsir Smith (born in New Zealand of Scottish parentage and wrote in Lallans) for a dram in Milne’s Bar, Hanover Street in Edinburgh’s New Town.

I came across MacCaig for the first time at the Traverse Theatre, during its second incarnation, in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket - a local skid row that went up market. During the Edinburgh Festival there were daily afternoon poetry readings in the theatre bar. Two other hopefuls like myself daily sat on the floor just outside the floor and listened so we were not charged admission. During intervals we were allowed in. We all begged a short reading slot each from Alan Jackson and Pete Morgan the organisers. We were allowed in the day we read. On all days I tried to sell a clutch of poems that had been typed up by a girlfriend on a portable machine, photocopied and stapled together complete with a hand drawn title page for each. They sold pretty well and my motivation to get in during the intervals. Dear Robert Garioch, who wrote memorably with humour in Lallans and read wonderfully happily parted with his half a crown for a copy and Alan Jackson gave me free publicity by displaying a copy to the audience before I did my reading slot. MacCaig lounged at the bar with a dram and gave me a stony faced "no" when asked to buy. He looked to me then superior in a school masterly way. Only a few years out of school I knew the tone and thought it Morningside. It was Bruntsfield. I came within a mile.

I came across him again at intervals and at a distance, usually at poetry readings. My first impressions coloured my early response to his work. Even now I can hear his voice when silently reading one of his poems. He confesses in one poem to "being in a Li Po mood". His penchant for short poems, his concision and precision in homing into and crystallising a moment gives his work an oriental feel now, for me, contributes to his uniqueness as a poet which at nineteen came over as brusqueness and perhaps some bitterness.

In the early Seventies my ability to buy poetry was limited by financial constraints and interests in other things and lack of contact with a small press culture. The Penguin Modern Poets series for that reason was a boon, and a revelation in its choice of poets for a wider public. Norman MacCaig appeared in No21 along with Ian Crighton Smith and George MacKay Brown. All three men were very different poets from almost completely different cultures within the small country that called them Scottish. MacCaig was the Edinburgh man, the Lowlander to Brown’s Orkney Norse and Smith’s Hebridean Gael.

Characteristically, a dozen of MacCaig’s poems in his selection had been previously unpublished and serves to illustrate his productivity. I think he enjoyed the natural thrill of all writers have of seeing new work reach an audience. My favourite in this selection is "Assisi". The opening lines are riveting:

The dwarf with his hands on backwards

Sat, slumped like a half-filled sack

On tiny twisted legs from which

Sawdust might run…

This poem is different in location from the regular run of subjects he took always from his own experience. It was a reaction and insurance against falling foul of the repetition, in his own words from the introduction: " a severe attack of fuzzy-edged, surrealistic verbo-juice" which was the New Apocalypse poetry of the 1930s and 40s. In "Assisi", MacCaig focuses on the little man. He is not given equality with the basilica dedicated to St Francis and the Giotto frescoes, though possesses a status that other tourists fail to register at all, "they who had passed the ruined temple outside"; it is the virtue of at least being alive while St. Francis is dead.

MacCaig was a conscientious objector in the Second World War. Although ever growing in reputation as a poet he spent forty years as a primary school teacher. Dunn points out that the position he took up may have had something to do with a lack of recognition or even promotion. However this was worked into becoming a further strength of his poetry. He demonstrates in his work the futility of man and his transitory nature that forever proposes the arrogance of immortality. An example of this that comes readily to mind is found in the poem "Stages":

I sat on stones that had been taken

from a derelict house to patch

a house now derelict.

There are many others, making the same or a similar point, which is always said freshly as if for the first time.

MacCaig must have been about fifty and on school holidays when I first meet him at the Traverse Theatre in 1969. He was then in his late sixties when he was a tutor to me at Stirling University during his tenure as Reader In Poetry, a far seeing move by the University to honour one of the best in the land quantum leaps beyond the douce and dour Edinburgh worthies.

As to be expected from a poet who openly derided the society and protocol of academia his approach was very different from any other tutor that I had at University. Each meeting was unexpected and uplifting as it was practically useless to the topic our study of 20th Century poetry threw at us. MacCaig may well have belonged by that time to a literary establishment but he still remained a maverick who could delight undergraduates in tutorials or at open lectures where he would come and speak about his interests in poetry. They were vast and included work in translation from Eastern European poetry. In tutorials he would rail against academics and wave a hand towards the rest of the English Department. I also remember him disliking the use of a Thesaurus and believe this tool would be anathema to his own creative work. This is unsurprising given his early proclivities for the surreal and later fine ability to view things from unusual angles. Showing my willingness to follow suit I trashed Thomas Hardy's poem "At Castle Boterel" only to get a low grade and a kindly note beside the mark to the effect that the poem was not as bad as I seemed to think. This from a man who was born while Hardy still lived and was one of his inheritors in love poetry and observation of people and landscape.

As editor of the student literary magazine of the time, called "Hairst" after the Scottish word for harvest, I interviewed MacCaig. He wanted to do the session in the bar, I would guess with a Talisker or Laphroaig single malt to hand. It may have been a more loquacious interview. I had borrowed a small portable tape recorder and persuaded him there may be too much noise for the machine. So we met in his room at the University and did a dry interview that, on reflection, was perhaps a little clinical and mechanical.

What still stands out? He wrote mostly poems of a few verses. Why? "I’m a short-breathed man was the gist of the reply. I touched on his large published output and broached the subject of a collected volume appearing. "It is something that smells too much of tombstones for me, they can do one after I have gone," he said. It actually appeared in 1992, four years before his death, though the current suggestion is that this was more of a large selected and the definitive one post-tombstone is yet to come. I believe MacCaig was sincere in what he said to me that day. I believe also he was a true teacher, giving an undergraduate practise. He seemed comfortable in the student community as if it had given him a freedom he may not have had in his years of teaching. I certainly feel there is a loosening up in the later poems, not simply because he had turned to free verse but because there was time to indulge what he was good at. He was always happy to give a poem to student publications – lending his name almost to give some veracity to whatever publication it happened to be.

Scotland has the habit, like Ireland, of having its "grand old man of letters" as the rather gross phrase often goes. MacCaig was landed with the title after the death of Hugh Mac Dairmid. I dared to ask him what he thought of this appellation and the reply was to the effect that some people needed to think in terms of a pecking order. I think this is very characteristic of MacCaig. He had no truck with such positioning. The evidence is in his poetry as his poem "A Man In My Position" illustrates. The poem is also the title of his 1969 collection:

Here my words carefully.

Some are spoken

Not by me, but

By a man in my position.

Edwin Morgan seems to have been given the mantle now and liable to take a similar view.

A last contact was to share one or two train journeys with MacCaig when Scottish winter made the roads too treacherous for the commute to Stirling. Wrapped up well we talked of mundane things – nobody would have guessed we were both men in the position of also being poets. As I now move into my fifties I have a firmer taste for MacCaig’s work than my young self. He talks of mundane things, expresses them very simply but always manages to look at things from an extraordinary angle. From his position in the grey tenements of Edinburgh he saw things in a universal way.

James Bell