I pick out an armful, put them in my bag and turn to a low shelf, double height for reference books, on the west wall: Collins Encyclopaedia of Scotland; Elspeth MacLeod’s Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Scotland; The Covenanter Encyclopaedia; the Royal Scottish Geographical Society’s Encyclopaedia of Scottish Places and Landscape. A small white label is fixed to each spine and on it, handwritten in black ink, is a number—032, 032.1, 032.2. The Dewey Decimal Library Classification System. McWatt was nothing if not thorough. And a man of his time. I did a semester at the Center for Dewey Studies in Carbondale, Illinois—where I met Alma, a fellow Scot, who went on to become my editor at Aikenhead Press and is now editor-in-chief at Thackeray—and, though a detailed understanding of the system is as useful now to the modern archivist as is a facility with horses to the average city cab driver, I’ve always taken a nerdish pleasure in matching category to number.
Inevitably, poetry is the largest section in McWatt’s library, taking up the remainder of the wall, all the way up to the rafters. I choose a shelf at random. There is a copy of Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse, one of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, a Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, a Norton Anthology of English Literature and a Faber Book of Modern Verse. The first, a former public library book, stamped “withdrawn” on the date slip, has a split spine and signs of insect infestation; the Palgrave’s, also second-hand, some English kid’s discarded school prize, has detached boards and evidence of mould growth; the pages of the paperback Penguin are brown and frilled, as are the pages of the Norton; while the Faber, apparently acquired new around 1965, the date of publication, is in comparatively good condition with only a slight UV discoloration of the jacket. All are identified by a sticker numbered 821 (English Poetry). These are thrift-store and bouquiniste finds, bought for cents, and some are in such poor condition they’ll defeat the most skilled conservationist. There’s nothing here of antiquarian value; the library’s true worth is as a guide to McWatt’s creative life. There’s plenty to investigate, but not now. I have the tides to think of.
I lock up again and run back to the house, shivering. Austin was never an option, though I did seriously toy with the idea of Oklahoma, specifically the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa. As in Austin, the temperature there right now would be in the high eighties. Agnes would have loved all the Old West and Native American collections, and Tulsa’s comparative proximity to Austin might have worked too, in terms of Marco’s access to Agnes. But in the end I lost my nerve. Tulsa, home of the evangelical Christian Oral Roberts University, was never going to be our kind of town, though the accommodation would have been less primitive and the climate, and probably the welcome, would have been more congenial than in Fascaray.
Here, even the dead are against me. McWatt seems to have taken up residence in my brain and is constantly denouncing me as a fraud. Okay, I silently tell him—closing up his drawers, bundling the notebooks into a box and his papers into my backpack—my accent may be transatlantic and my tastes and experiences may be bourgeois-cosmopolitan. But I’m as Scottish as you are. Or were.
I close up the house, clamber onto the quad bike and make my way back to Finnverinnity through the implacable rain. Yes. What could have been. And then there was my relationship with Marco. The biggest Could Have Been of all. I might have hacked it after all as a “trailing spouse,” an academic’s contented partner in Austin, swimming in Barton Springs, jogging round Lady Bird Lake, enjoying the music scene, though not necessarily the musicians—my dalliance with Pascal inoculated me against that special brand of folly. As for Marco, I could have been a little more French about it all, overlooked his indiscretion and moved on. And would our little girl, gamely coping with her new life as the child of a single parent marooned on a patch of damp peat floating in the North Sea, be more deeply secure if I’d capitulated? Instead, I tried to get even, with near-fatal results.
I’ve bored my friends beyond endurance on the subject of my failed relationship. Now I’m beginning to bore myself. This ancient mariner needs to find another subject. It might as well be Grigor McWatt.
The Rhame o the Aunceant Taury
The Sun nou rase onwith the richt
Oot o the sea cam he,
Still dernt in haar, an on the caur
Ganged doon intae the sea.
An the guid sooth wind still huffed ahint
But nae douce bird did follae,
Nor onie day for scran or play
Cam tae the taury’s hollae!
An Ah hae done a hellish thing,
An it would dunt them raw:
For aw averred, Ah killt the bird
That made the souch tae blaw.
Ah gowk! said they, the bird tae slay
That made the souch tae blaw!
—Grigor McWatt, efter Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1947*
* * *
* From Kenspeckelt, Virr Press, 1959. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
16 September 2014
Agnes was never a complainer, though she occasionally asked, after she’d spent time with certain of her friends in Brooklyn, “Mom, why are you being so posh?” She knows the story. It’s not my fault. I’m under no illusion that a tendency to pronounce words as if impersonating a minor member of English royalty will impress my daughter’s friends. Still, Agnes is mortified. Posh does not go down well in some Brooklyn circles. “Courtney says you talk like you’re Mary Poppins or something,” she told me. Posh does not go down well in Fascaradian circles either.
English, or my own buffed-up version of Canadian English, was not my first language, though if you heard me speak you might find this hard to believe. My mid-Atlantic accent is essentially a North American version of old-guard BBC, upper received pronunciation, that outmoded signifier of a top-tier private school, Ivy League education and a trust fund, none of which I possess.
Honed in compulsory elocution classes in St. Maria Goretti’s and polished out of all recognition by my scholarship year in Oxfordshire, my voice suggests “the love child of Katharine Hepburn and Alastair Cooke,” Marco would say in the days when he liked me; “the bastard offspring of Princess Anne and Gore Vidal,” he would say more recently, when he didn’t.
My “a’s”—if I don’t watch it—are long, I take a baaarth rather than a bath, every consonant is pronounced, and the endings of my words are, despite my best efforts, ringingly enunciated. But, though I can almost pass as posh among North Americans susceptible to a notion of Old World noblesse (useful in job interviews and when meeting museum donors and corporate sponsors), I’ve never been able to shake off the feeling that I’m an impostor and that any minute I’ll be unmasked—pronounced, that is, with careful deliberation, as unmaaarsked.
I swear Margaret Mackenzie smirked at me in the shop this morning when I bought some groceries.
“I can do Scots, if you’d prefer, ya cheeky besom,” I felt like hissing in my broadest Glaswegian, which can come out when I’ve had too much to drink. Or when I’m angry. But I’ve only been here a month; too early to be making scenes or enemies. All in good time.
The Herkeners
“Is there aebdy there?” speired the Traiveler,
Chappin on the muinlit door;
An his cuddie ramshed the gress
O the forest’s ferny floor;
An a birdie flew oot the turret,
Abuin the Traiveler’s heid:
An he knyped oan the door agane a seicont time;
“Is there aebdy there?” he said.
But naebdy cam doon tae the Traiveler;
Nae heid frae the leaf-fringed sill
Hinged owr an keeked intae his grey een,
Where he stuid kittelt an still…
—Grigor McWatt, efter Walter de la Mare, 1947*
* * *
* From Kenspeckelt, Virr Press, 1959. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
The forward-
thinking editor of the Auchwinnie Pibroch, Roy Fraser, visiting Fascaray in the late 1940s for a fishing weekend, overheard McWatt perorating in the Finnverinnity Inn on the historical and cultural case for Scottish independence. Fraser spotted the poet’s potential as a lively contrarian and signed him to write a weekly column for the paper. The fee the Pibroch paid for “Frae Mambeag Brae,” as the column was called, was small, even by the standards of the day, but to the impoverished poet, subsistence crofter, beachcomber and occasional fisherman, two decades before his song royalties began to roll in, the column provided a significant and regular boost to his income.
Remarkably, he continued to write for the Pibroch for the next sixty-six years, seeing off nine editors and three proprietors, until a month before his death in 2014. The columns reflected the preoccupations of The Fascaray Compendium, with subjects ranging from politics and history (local and national), poetry and the natural world, to island life, customs and lore, as well as accounts of the latest mishaps in his menagerie and the antics of his sheepdogs (he went through them, like his editors, at a rate) and, above all, even in his lightest columns, making the case for the singularity and supremacy of Scottish culture.
In June 1947, McWatt achieved a degree of national attention in Scotland when he used his column in the Auchwinnie Pibroch to lambast the film adaptation of A. J. Cronin’s best-selling novel The Green Years,* and, by extension, to condemn the entire oeuvre of the much-loved, internationally successful Scottish novelist.
“It takes a good deal to get me out to the pictures,” wrote McWatt, “particularly when, as last month, the seasonal gales make any crossing to the mainland cinema from my island home unpleasant, if not hazardous.”
The big screen offered no solace.
“The most mawkish, preposterous and unrecognisable picture of our native land and its inhabitants was presented in 127 excruciating minutes,” he wrote.
It wasn’t just the simplicity of the plot he objected to but the phoney accents of the Anglo-American cast—“loch pronounced as ‘lok’; dance, which as every Scot knows rhymes with ants, is rendered ‘dawnce’; bonny is given an unintended echo of the charnel house when it is delivered as ‘boney’; banks become ‘benks’; and so we are given that iconic Scottish setting and song—The Boney Benks of Lok Loamin,” he continued.
The only pronunciation they got right, he maintained, was of “aye,” which, “once they crack it and realise it rhymes with the Isle of Skye rather than Mandalay, or Fascaray, is hard to get wrong. But fired by their success, they cram it into every sentence, at the expense of sense, and give the impression rather of excitable Mexican rancheros than natives of proud Scotia.”
If you were seeking something to say in favour of the film, McWatt argued, “you could acknowledge that it is faithful to the book—the one as bad as the other—and there is consistency in that the dour and foolish characters on both page and screen bear as much resemblance to a true Scot as does that preening Englishman Laurence Olivier to your correspondent.
“It is bad enough that the Hollywood panjandrums get us so wrong, and care so little about us that they make no attempt to get us right, but the real criminal in this enterprise is Cronin, one of the highest paid authors in the English-speaking world, who has presented this abominably lightweight and false image of his own country. By the time the travesty drew to a merciful close, I left the cinema in a rage. If I had happened to meet any Hollywood film magnates or highly paid authors that night, I could not have accounted for my actions.”
News of McWatt’s sustained insult travelled as far south as Glasgow, where the Sunday Post newspaper reprinted half of it word for word—without paying him a penny, he noted bitterly—and mounted a feeble defence of Cronin.
“Heart-warming stories for hard times,” wrote the Post’s columnist Francis Gay. “Only a nipscart would be unmoved by Cronin’s inspiring prose.”
The controversy earned McWatt a reputation as a professional curmudgeon on matters Caledonian—a reputation he gleefully accepted—and soon he was receiving invitations to Glasgow (travel expenses included) to take part in BBC Scotland arts programmes.
He was born, he said, to be “a proud Berserker in the manner of the ancient Viking heroes, visiting wrath, or riastral, upon the enemy—in my case Anglocentric philistinism—with no quarter given.”
It was at the BBC studio in Queen Margaret Drive that he first met Christopher Grieve, better known as the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, and over a stiffener in the hospitality room, a friendship was ignited that would place Grigor McWatt at the heart of what later became known as the New Wave of the Scottish Cultural Renaissance.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
* * *
* Published by Gollancz, 1944. Film adaptation, directed by Victor Saville and starring Charles Coburn and Gladys Cooper, 1946.
Oan First Keekin intae MacDiarmid’s Thistle
Muckle stravaiged Ah i the realms o gowd,
An mauny guidly states an kinricks keeked,
Roon mauny westlin islands hae Ah bin,
Which makars leal tae Apollo haud.
Aft o wan braid expaunse whaur Ah’d bin tellt,
That deep-brou’d Homer ringed as his ane glebe,
Yet did Ah niver braithe its purest saucht,
Tae Ah read MacDiarmid scrievin in fu flaucht;
Syne Ah felt some leuker o the skies
Whan a new starnie gleeks intae his ken;
Or like creesh Cortez whan wi aigle een,
He gowped at the Pacific—an aw his men
Leuked at each ither wi a camsteirie ween—
Lownin, upby a tap in Darien.
—Grigor McWatt, efter John Keats, 1948*
* * *
* From Kenspeckelt, Virr Press, 1959. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
In addition to a steady income, McWatt’s column in the Auchwinnie Pibroch provided him with a larger and more engaged audience than was ever available at the Finnverinnity Inn. Throughout the late 1940s he wrote passionately in support of the ill-fated Covenant petition for a devolved Scottish Parliament and in 1949 he reached an even wider audience when he used his column to condemn a speech given at the Auchwinnie Academy prize-giving by the regional director of education, Harry Elliott, who had called for the elimination of Scots “dialect” in schools arguing that it “handicaps its speakers, is not pretty and its literature is small.”
“They have robbed us of the Gaelic, these Uncle Tams,” wrote McWatt in “Frae Mambeag Brae” (the Pibroch column was reprinted later in the Scotsman), “and now they wish to rob us of our other ancient, robust and poetic tongue and to deny us our great tradition of Dunbar, Barbour and Fergusson. Well, I have a good Scots saying for Mr. Elliott—‘Shut yer geggie, ye wee nyaff, an awa an bile yer heid.’ ”
McWatt also expressed support for the Reverend Paterson, whose recent scathing pulpit attack in Finnverinnity kirk on the Duke of Edinburgh, young husband of the English Princess Elizabeth, for playing polo on a Sunday made it to the front page of one London paper. “I am not, myself, strictly a sabbatarian,” wrote McWatt, “but I am a republican, and any attack on these idle foreigners who claim our land as their fiefdom is welcome for whatever reason, from whichever quarter.” Less controversially, he wrote about the excavation of the Neolithic chambered tomb at Heuchaw, the pleasures and perils of mushroom foraging, and the seasonal invasion of compass jellyfish on Calasay’s beaches. The income from his column allowed him the luxury of more frequent journeys to the mainland. He would catch a morning boat for day trips to Auchwinnie to meet the Pibroch’s editor, Roy Fraser, at the Fisher’s Airms pub, and his friend Andrew McMillan, who ran the Auchwinnie Press printworks, which in 1959, under the imprint Virr Press (later Smeddum Beuks), would begin its long professional association with McWatt by printing Kenspeckelt, the first of the poet’s five volumes of sel
f-published verse.
McWatt would also watch the occasional matinee at the Auchwinnie Astoria and visit the local Carnegie Library, a two-storey building of pink Corsehill sandstone, built in 1905 in the beaux arts style. These days the library is closed, apart from the small reference section at the back where the local archives are stored. The rest of the semi-derelict building houses a thrift store and a food bank for the region’s poor. But even in its well-funded mid-century years—backed by a civic-minded local authority that believed books were a route to self-improvement, supported by church elders who, though their own reading needs were entirely met by the Scriptures, endorsed a secular “house of books” as an alternative to inn and sin—Auchwinnie Carnegie Library could never rival McWatt’s own collection of Scottish literature, history and verse.
Four or five times a year in the late forties and early fifties, Murdo “the Fiddle” McIntyre, who lived in heroic squalor in Doonmara, would move into An Tobar for a week to take care of the animals, allowing McWatt to travel further afield, to Glasgow for occasional TV or radio appearances but more usually to Edinburgh. The poet would not be drawn on the details of his visits to the capital.
“Twa things you couldnae ask Grigor,” said Effie MacLeod. “ ‘Gie us a sang.’ And ‘How wis Embra? Nice wee break?’…That’s three things, ken.”
He refused all invitations to England. The Poetry Society in London made several overtures and only once did he appear to waver, when in October 1948 he received an invitation from Muriel Spark, then the society’s general secretary and editor of its Poetry Review.
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