She couldn’t be talked into an e-reader though I’ve brought mine, containing a library of classics I’ll never live long enough to read. I’ve also brought a back-wrecking selection of books that weren’t available in digital form, among them Knox-Cardew’s clinically obese critical study.
There is a souvenir of my own past—my grandfather’s 1936 Blackwood edition of the Fascaringa Saga, as revered and little read in our household as the family Bible. As well as my past, there is also my present—the 1964 Selected Verse of Hugh MacDiarmid, poet and figurehead of Scottish nationalism, in the Raucle Press edition with an introduction by his erstwhile friend Grigor McWatt; Warld in a Gless, the complete collection of McWatt’s “reimagined” poems, from 1945 to the early nineties; distressed paperback copies of his two slender volumes of memoir, Forby and Ootwith; and Frae Mambeag Brae and Wittins, the Stravaigin Press selections of his essays and newspaper columns for the Auchwinnie Pibroch.
Ailish Mooney also unearthed a Festschrift pamphlet of reminiscences of McWatt—Poet in a Landscape, published by Auchwinnie Press in 2000 with interviews with fellow Fascaradians to celebrate the poet’s eightieth birthday. My grandfather refused to be interviewed—he had left the island behind more than half a century ago, he said—and his lack of grace was matched by its subject; McWatt tried to suppress the booklet by buying up as many copies as he could and burning them. Here in my hand, in its softback plaid cover (the McWatt tartan again—overlapping grids of purple and mustard on a field of blue), is one that got away. I riffle through its unexceptional pages—“ ‘He’s a private man,’ says Marsaili MacDonald, proprietor of the Bothy guest house. ‘He wouldn’t like the fuss of this book, wouldn’t like people talking about him.’ ”
There are three other Fascaray-related curios—Jim Struan’s Silent Killing for Cubs and Scouts, a self-published memoir of the Finnverinnity House war years, and two accounts of more recent and arcane local history: Reflections from the Pilgrim Path, a book of pious New Age flummery by Neville Booth, one of the founders of the Balnasaig Centre, which has been drawing the credulous comfortably-off for “spirit-channelling” retreats for forty years, and The Wisdom of the Wilderness Within by Evelyn Fletcher, Booth’s former partner and current high priestess at Balnasaig. All three fail to mention the island’s most famous son.
And then there is my own book, The But’n’Ben Baroness, my brief and justly unregarded life of Isobel Grant, the doughty amateur collector who founded the Am Fasgadh Highland Folk Museum on the island of Iona in 1935. She deserved better than this thinly worked-up dissertation, published by Aikenhead Press, a Scots-interest American imprint so small, with a print run so negligible that it might as well have been a vanity outfit. I carry the book as a talisman, I guess; my own regressive keepsake, a reminder, in case I ever begin to founder on our chilly desert island, of the busy, work-obsessed student I once was, with a promising career ahead of her.
It’s also part of the reason I’m here; it certainly wasn’t my interview performance (thirty apologetic seconds on my strengths, an impassioned thirty minutes on my weaknesses) with the Auchwinnie Regional Development and Enterprise Board that finally landed me the job. My family connections can’t have done any harm. My grandfather, Hector McPhail, like all the Fascaray Five, has the status of a minor deity round here. The commission for a book on McWatt that I’d wangled from Alma, my old editor at Aikenhead, now editor-in-chief at Thackeray College Press, must have helped too. But Isobel Grant swung it.
I stare at the cover photograph of the formidable spinster. She stands in tweed skirt and oversized glasses at the peeling door of a croft which, thatched roof apart, could be number 19. I’m not sure whether to curse her or thank her.
I feel a sudden need to step outside, to inhale the salty air and gaze at the sea. For a moment I’m vindicated as the sun breaks through the gloom, casting a sparkling net across the sea—this crazy move, all the unnecessary upheaval, was necessary after all.
One minute of exultation, then the clouds sweep back and the midges move in. Tiny, numerous and relentless, they swarm at my lips and my eyes. On the shore, they’ve descended on Agnes too and she runs towards me, laughing and swatting her face. I look down the street where, outside the pub, the smokers flail their arms against their own insect hordes. I run inside with my daughter and slam the door. I must look out those midge hoods.
In July and August, on rare days of startling and sustained heat, dragonflies as blue as the cloudless skies shimmer over cushions of moss by the burn while the midges, who abhor direct sunlight, are nowhere to be seen. Out to sea, somnolent groups of whales pass like cortèges of cruise ships and around them dolphins and porpoises joyously arc and dip as if stitching the ocean’s silken canopy of turquoise, gentian and cobalt.
By the shore, wild roses are viscera pink against the vaulted blue of sky and sea, and the machair is scattered with orchids like fuschia pine cones. At the rocky margins around Loch Aye, flag irises—seggie flooers—bristle like the golden spears of a pygmy army and swallows swoop and dive over the water, pecking at it and sending out concentric circles of waves, making long-playing records of the loch’s black skin.
Guillemots, razorbills and screaming seagulls plummet from the sky, swooping to scoop up shellfish from the shore. They carry mussels and clams up as high as the tallest Caledonian pines then open their beaks and drop the shells, smashing them on the rocks to yield up the viscous pelagic hearts. Clamorous chicks, balls of pure down, emerge from eggs hidden beneath the samphire and sea wrack and the glinting cargo of seashells. There is treasure at every step.
As sunset trails its scarlet pennants in the west at the end of our long summer days, glittering fountains of mackerel fry spray up from the enamelled sea like silver confetti as the tiny fish flee unseen predators.
Here, poised between sea and sky in this limitless azure sphere, it is possible to imagine that man can live at peace again, set aside the deadly squabbles of tribe and territory, reconnect with nature and re-enter Arcadia.
Then the day darkens, storms descend and relentless rain turns this Eden into a bleak and chilly hell, reminding us that the world is not always beneficent. And out beyond the Mhor Sgheir reef, north of Lusnaharra, the Carracorry whirlpool, which has been known to swallow rigged ships whole, is at its most dangerous during the half-ebb spring tides of high summer, when the weather is at its most benign.
—Grigor McWatt, 1945, The Fascaray Compendium
INVENTORY OF SCOTS WORDS DESCRIBING CLOUDS, CLOODS OR CLUDS
berk a covering of clouds, overcast
ceul motion of clouds in wind
goog a heavy, dirty cloud
grum a dark patch in the sky indicating a storm
hert-sair a cloud resembling a broken heart
hum an overcast sky
kerfin drift of small clouds
kyrie passage of clouds before wind
mirlie-backs cirrocumulus cloud formations
muirbreak deluge of rain on moorland
owerga a rising bank of black cloud
pouthered lawyr a fleecy white cloud resembling a lawyer’s wig
prattick an unusually heavy cloudburst
roarie bummler a bank of storm clouds
rouk thick, misty cloud
scull-gab a cloud formation resembling a human skull
skub high, hazy, drifting cloud
thwankin clouds mingling in thick and gloomy succession
tumald an intense downpour
voaler’s-crammacks cirrus clouds, like goat hairs
watter-mooth a burst rain cloud
windy-rogs lines of clouds indicating bad weather
yackle small white clouds shaped like teeth
yagach heavy mass of cloud portending loss or disaster
—Grigor McWatt, 1946, The Fascaray Compendium
In a documentary made for BBC Scotland in 2007, seven years before McWatt’s death, Allan Logan
, the literary critic and outspoken nationalist, compared the Bard of Fascaray to Walter Scott “in the impact their respective work has had on the national sense of self.” McWatt had little time for Scott, dismissing the romantic novelist as a “fawning Uncle Tam, with a taste for pageantry, who courted English autocracy,” but he graciously accepted Logan’s view that the work of “the foremost poet of the Fascaradian archipelago” had brought “the glories of Scotland, the sublimity of our hills, our seas and rivers, our cascading falls and limpid lochs—defying colonisation, neglect, and the self-cauterising spirit of the dispossessed—to the attention of the wider world, and ultimately returned our land to us.”
Old film footage—a jerky home movie in faded colours made by an amateur fan in 1962—shows the poet in his early forties wearing the familiar kilt and beret, beating the bounds of Calasay with a skittish Border collie and a shy teenaged boy, identified as McWatt’s assistant Donald MacInnes. In fisherman’s sweater and army fatigues, young MacInnes, supervised by McWatt, chops wood, carries a bucket of water from a well and rolls playfully in the grass with a creature that looks like an overweight ferret. (Those familiar with the life and work will know that this is Marty, McWatt’s pet pine marten, part of the ungovernable menagerie that featured in some of the poet’s lighter and best-loved columns for the Auchwinnie Pibroch.)
The old footage is interspersed with Logan’s interview with the poet, nearly half a century later, filmed at the fireside of An Tobar. At one point, Logan asks McWatt, then aged eighty-six, if he is ever lonely, if in his “splendid isolation” he misses “the society of others.” The poet takes the pipe from his mouth and spits in the hearth before answering.
“Lonely?” he repeats, incredulous. “Open your eyes, man. Step outside and look around. Apart from my extended family—the dogs, the otters, pine martens, wild cats, the coos and hens and goat, the visiting seabirds and seals—I know every lichen-covered rock, every hill, every granite pinnacle and glacial corrie, every burn and rivulet, every gorse bush, rowan tree and hawthorn, every primrose and harebell, as I would know a much-loved face down the years. I’ve seen this place in every season, all weather, watched the islands on the horizon shimmering in heat haze, buffeted by blizzards and dissolving in haar, seen the sea as blue as Eden’s own ocean and as black and gurling as hell’s cauldron. I know the call of the greylags, the silver fanfare of the whooper swans and the chatter of chaffinches busy at their nests in the alders as if they were the cries of my own weans. Tell me, how the devil could I possibly be lonely?”
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
21 August 2014
My small cache of correspondence between McWatt and Lilias Hogg, the Flooer o Rose Street and Muse o Menzies’, is a start. But only a start. I exaggerated its extensiveness and significance to the Auchwinnie Development Board, and to Alma at Thackeray College Press, because I wanted the job and the book deal. I’ve got to do better than this. There’s some extra-literary curiosity about the Hogg–McWatt affair; it’s the stuff of vintage, high-end gossip even among those who’ve barely read a word of his work, a staple of the culture sections of the posher papers in a narrative he would have loathed—a story of the doomed love of a beguiling girl for an unattainable and much older poet genius; a kind of Bloomsbury-of-the-North subplot, with added whisky and incidental bagpipes.
The fact that the only surviving picture of Lilias Hogg was taken in her early twenties has been good for the myth. Their story has been bracketed with other “poetic grand passions and star-crossed lovers”: Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura, Lowell and Blackwood, Dylan and Caitlin, Hughes and Plath. One Saturday supplement, struggling to come up with editorial to justify its Valentine’s Day advertising spread, used pictures of Virginia and Leonard Woolf alongside photographs of Lilias Hogg and Grigor McWatt to illustrate a feature on “lofty literary passions that took no prisoners.”
Then there is the tantalising “other woman” angle. The enigmatic “Jean,” later derided by a bitter Hogg as “the murky quine [dark lady] of your sonnets.” For fourteen years, Lilias had believed that she herself was the sole inspiration for McWatt’s love poems and that their marriage was inevitable. She never recovered from the blow dealt by news of his secret affair.
Hogg and McWatt even made it into the tabloid press—Me magazine—though here their story was served up as a cautionary tale of a woman who ruined her looks and her life (word order reflecting the hierarchy of loss) by spending too much time hanging round creative sorts in bars. Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday and Amy Winehouse were also cited in the piece, which described McWatt as a “songwriter” rather than a poet.
There is no record of his views on the press version of his relationship with Lilias but the fact that he refused to give interviews on the subject indicates his position. The references to Lilias Hogg that I’ve seen so far in The Fascaray Compendium are few and oblique. But the Auchwinnie Development Board and Alma at Thackeray Press are keen on this angle. My two bundles of letters, one skimpy, the other chunky, their value in inverse proportion to their dimensions, give us only fragments of the real story. McWatt’s letters to Hogg (the small bundle, plus three postcards, ranging in dates from 1958 to 1988) are a fraction of their total correspondence. Written in black ink on unlined blue notepaper, these letters were preserved by Hogg and passed on to me by Edinburgh University Library. We know that she returned a number of his letters to him in despair or pique and that, strapped for cash, she also sold some of his letters to an Edinburgh book dealer. My researcher, Ailish, is trying to track these down from Glasgow.
My haul of letters from Hogg to McWatt, covering the same period, is more extensive but less useful; they’re carbon copies which she retained—Lilias had an eye to posterity even then—and the blue ink is smeared and faded. She probably tried to hawk them to the book dealer too but they would have been worthless. With luck, I might find some of the originals in Calasay. With more luck, I might locate the McWatt letters that Hogg returned to him. I am, I know, counting on a lot of luck here.
The keys to the enterprise hang from an iron ring, sinister as Dark Age manacles. I feel like a jailer as I rattle them. They’ll open the doors to his house in Calasay and, I hope, unlock a hoard of truth-telling treasures, illuminate the life and work of the Bard of Fascaray, for my book as well as the museum, secure my job and consolidate my new life here. My new life, and my daughter’s.
Johanna McAllister, the young part-time administrator of the Fascaray Trust, who has been taking care of the Calasay site, assures me that the house and McWatt’s remarkable library, housed in a converted byre, have been kept intact since the poet’s death in January. She goes in every week, making the journey on quad bike, negotiating the tricky tides across the strand from Ruh, to dust and air the rooms, check that the rain hasn’t got in, the burn hasn’t risen under the floorboards or the wind hasn’t blown the roof over the cliff.
Apart from the rest of the Compendium notebooks, there are stacks of paper there for me to go through, she tells me. “Letters, pamphlets, bills, receipts, goodness knows what. All safe and dry so far. I’ve put a box of stuff under the desk in the house for you to make a start.”
Also awaiting my attention is a collection of agricultural implements and other artefacts of island life, amassed by McWatt over six decades and stored in a cart shed on his croft. I must go through it, catalogue it and bring the best of it to the new museum in Finnverinnity.
“There’s an unbelievable amount of stuff, just sitting there,” says Johanna. “I’ve struggled to sort through it all. That lot, and the library…”
My taped interview with Effie MacLeod (done in June on a brief trip to Scotland—a four-day festival of jet lag, bad food and bad faith) has been digitised, copied and transcribed by the assiduous Ailish Mooney. Ailish is also pursuing other McWatt biographical leads, collating a comprehensive list of recordings of his song, “Hame tae
Fascaray,” while in her spare time completing her MLitt in Archives and Record Keeping at Glasgow University. She sounds better equipped for my job than I am.
I need more—anything—on McWatt’s childhood, which is a black hole in terms of documentation, and I have to trace surviving SOE veterans to piece together his war years. McWatt’s memoirs are almost parodically unforthcoming and include only a handful of cagey sentences about these key periods of his life. The Scots have never been good at kissing and telling. Preliminary enquiries, made by phone and email before I left New York, got nowhere and I was too preoccupied with packing up my life, and my relationship, to pursue them further. Ailish, of course, is on the case.
There is the new Grigor McWatt Heritage Centre and Fascaray Museum, funded by his estate and the Fascaray Trust, to set up for official opening at the end of December—less than four months away! I need to choose and collate archive material and exhibits, get some narrative coherence on McWatt’s biography and the history of the island, and somehow find time to write my 40,000-word book on McWatt’s life and work, provisionally titled A Granite Ballad. There are the poems to deal with: his last three collections—Teuchter’s Chapbook, Thoog a Poog and That’s Me Awa—will be added to a new complete edition of his verse, along with any unpublished poems I find.
But my most monumental task is The Fascaray Compendium, McWatt’s vast seventy-year journal and survey of the island’s folklore, history, flora, fauna, and community life, which comprises 22,000 pages—more than eight million words, inscribed by fountain pen in his minuscule handwriting, prim as an embroidery stitch, in 276 softback quarto notebooks. A bundle of them, 1945 to 1970—one hundred notebooks weighing a total of 57lb (almost as heavy, I note, as my daughter)—was expensively couriered to me in four boxes to Brooklyn so I could start work on the manuscript to prepare it for publication. I did what I could before I got here. So much typing; I felt like a fifties stenographer. Johanna will help and there is provision in the budget for another typist, but I must edit it, compile an index, with Ailish’s help, and usher it finally into print in seven hardback volumes in two years’ time, 2016—two and a half years after the poet’s death. I ask myself how I signed up for all this and the answer comes back: Marco.
Hame Page 4
