A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
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* Correspondence held by Yale University Library.
14 November 2014
Another tug-of-love evening. My book? More work on the Compendium? The letters?
Agnes, uncomplaining and absorbed in artwork at her end of the table, doesn’t get a look-in.
Yale University Library has just agreed to lend McWatt’s correspondence with Ezra Pound to us for the museum opening. A bit of a coup, I thought. The letters are of interest to academics, literary biographers and, incidentally, to me, and will—properly exhibited—help to bulk out the display. The Auchwinnie Board, however, was not impressed. “They won’t exactly draw in the day trippers, will they?” said Gordon Nesbitt, who made it clear that we’ll need more pop culture—“accessibility,” he calls it—for any box-office success and, by implication, for any guarantee of future funding; the museum, and my job, depends on it.
There is a letter from the publisher of Silver Key Comics (1963) who wanted to produce a weekly comic strip based on “the adventures of Looa [sic] the sheep dog, Marty the Pine Marten and Otto the Otter, as recounted in your newspaper column in the Achwinnie Peabroch [sic]”; another from the Children’s Film Foundation, which in 1965 sought permission to make a film “using the lively characters from your private zoo in a short feature for our Saturday Morning Pictures’ audience”; and one from a London advertising agency seeking permission in 1970 to use the song “Hame tae Fascaray” in a TV advertising campaign for a new oat-based breakfast cereal.
Permission in the first two cases was refused in one dismissive line. In the case of the director of the London advertising agency, the poet went further, sending him a Gaelic incantation—Is mairg do ’n dual am poll itheadh. Is fhèarr am bonnach beag leis a’ bheannachd, na ’m bonnach mór leis a’ mhollachd—which McWatt also translated: “Pity him whose birthright is to eat dirt. Better a wee bannock wi a blessing than a big yin wi a curse.”
As far as Gordon Nesbitt is concerned, the prize exhibits so far are a request from Albert Grossman, then manager of Bob Dylan, for permission to record “Hame tae Fascaray” on Dylan’s 1964 album The Times They Are A-Changin’ and one from Columbia Records twelve years later for clearance to include McWatt’s song on Dylan’s live album Hard Rain. Permission was brusquely denied for the former and granted for the latter.
In fact, the bulk of McWatt’s letters comprise denials and refusals and, in the case of his correspondence with Lilias Hogg, evasions. I’m speaking against my job here, and I would never admit it to Nesbitt and the board, but it is the story of the thwarted lover, Lilias Hogg, that intrigues me most of all. Her letters, full of such bravado, anger and defiance, also have a quality lacking in much of McWatt’s correspondence—emotional authenticity.
Niver gie aw the Hert
Niver gie aw the hert fer loue,
Wull barelins seem wirth weenin o
Tae tapteed weemen gin it seem
Siccar, an they niver dwaum
It dwynes frae smeeg tae smeeg;
For aw that’s bonnie’s nocht
But swith, dwaumy couth delicht.
Och niver gie the hert ootricht,
For they, for aw sneith mooths can reel,
Hae gien their herts tae whumgee spiel.
An wha could spiel it weel eneuch
Gin deif an dwm an blyn wi loue?
He that writ this kens it aw
Syne his hert wis brak in twa.
—Grigor McWatt, efter W. B. Yeats, 1965*
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* From Kowk in the Kaleyard, Virr Press, 1975. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
McWatt continued his divided life—poet-anchorite of Fascaray and “rairin gadgie” of the howffs and inns of Edinburgh—throughout the sixties. Not all of these visits to the capital ended well. There are eyewitness accounts of evenings turning bitter, of a cursing McWatt “black affronted,” storming from the pub, often with Lilias running after him calling soothing words.
The occasion of these rages would be well-meaning young people who, recognising The Poet, would break into song. That song. The popular folk singer Hamish Imlach recorded “Hame tae Fascaray” in 1965 and, along with “The Wild Rover,” it became the most requested ballad in cellar bars and clubs throughout the UK. In one letter to Lilias, dated 14 June 1965, McWatt is scathing about Imlach—“He was born in Calcutta. He’s as Scots as Mahatma Gandhi.” For McWatt to hear his own words bawled by drunk youths—often university students, some of whom had the temerity to be English—was enough to drive him instantly “hame tae Fascaray.”
The letters at this time reveal a man consumed by passion, for poetry, landscape and nationhood—“our first victory since Bannockburn!” he wrote in 1967 after the election of Scottish National Party candidate Winnie Ewing as MP in Hamilton. But he is mute on the subject of love. When, if ever, he found time to kindle his relationship with “Jean” is not known. His “consuming ambition,” he wrote to Lilias, was to “build a bridge of words across the Clinch Straits, tae heal my family’s breach with oor ancestral hame and scrieve [write] Scotia back tae hersel.” He warned Lilias: “You must understand. This project is not a negligible undertaking and leaves little time for the smaller business of the human heart.”
Many of Lilias’s letters to her “Griogal Cridhe” in the mid-sixties seem to have been composed at the speed of thought. The handwriting is slapdash, an ink-spattered spree of loops and dots. It took me some time to decipher one scrawled letter, dated August 1966, which was written after a drinking session with Sydney and Archie:
After another heavy hoolie, seeing in the dawn in silent, bluitert awe, we found ourselves blinking against the daylight, away from our usual beat, as the unco guid, conscientious types in suits and secretarial mufti hurried to work. We hurried ourselves, to the nearest pub, an unfamiliar, cavernous joint. We breenged up to the counter and some snooty barmaid recoiled as we went to order a round. “It’s a bank, not a pub,” she pointed out with unnecessary hauteur.
Hogg emphasises again and again in the sixties just what a good time she is having, as if to say to McWatt: “Look what you’re missing!” She is sacked from Goldbergs for, she says, “liberating” some of the exotic birds kept in a cage in the department store’s rooftop cafe, and she makes a joke of it—“Billy the parrot flew the coop. Then I did too.”—though she must have been worried about money and security. Underscoring all her letters is a sense of honest anguish. Like McWatt, she is engaged in a lifelong search for connection, but for Lilias people took precedence over place.
“I feel strongly that in some way you and I are the same—lost souls spinning wildly, rogue planets in an alien universe,” she writes in April 1968. Unlike McWatt, who dips in and out of the vernacular, Lilias rarely uses Scots, except in jest. After immersion in McWatt’s Doric and Lallans (some of which, wrote Alastair Galbraith, “would bamboozle Burns”), Hogg’s sparky English can come as a relief. A fragile hope is in evidence—hope of love, perhaps, stirred by a too-personal reading of McWatt’s verse.
It would be hard for a romantically inclined young woman, infatuated by poetry and convinced that it is a communicable gift, to read some of McWatt’s verse as anything other than a direct come-on.
In one letter from Calasay, dated June 1968, he wrote to her: “I’ve been working up some metaphysicals. What do you think?”
Gin we hae warld eneuch an time,
This erchness Lassie, were nae crime.
We wid sit doon an think whit paith tae tak
An pass this lang loue’s day.
You wid stravaig by the Watter o Leith
While Ah hung aboot oan Mammor’s lanely heath.
Ah’d loue ye ten years afore the warld wis raw
An you could, if it pleases you, say naw,
Till England richts its wrangs an tyr
ants faw.
But jest ahint Ah hear the soond
O time’s auld tramcar gangin roond
An thonder aw aheid us lies
Muckle deserts bidin aye.
Let us pirl aw oor poost, an aw
Oor douceness intae wan baw.
An rive oor pleasures wi roch strife
Ben the airn yetts o life.
Sae tho we cannae mak oor sun
Staund still, yet we will gar him run.*
Hogg’s reply, from her basement flat in a decaying New Town terrace, was unequivocal:
“As to your metaphysical urgings, I can only, like Molly Bloom, exclaim ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ ”
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
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* “Gin We Hae Warld Eneuch,” efter Andrew Marvell, 1968. Kowk in the Kaleyard, Virr Press, 1975. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
15 November 2014
“Hurry, Mom! He’s waiting.”
It’s one of those fine winter days that give summer a run for its money—cloudless sky, amber sunlight, cleansing cold and a gentle breeze ruffling a sea blue as a Hollywood pool. We’re going on a boat trip round the island with Niall Kennedy. My contribution is a picnic. Agnes is bringing our waterproofs, a plastic container for shells, and a tablecloth. She wanted to film the trip for her father but I persuaded her to leave her phone behind, arguing that it might get swamped by a wave.
We walk down to the harbour where, instead of the sleek fibreglass yacht I was expecting, we see a small open wooden boat with a single red sail. It is, Niall tells us, a traditional fishing skiff, used on the island up to the beginning of the last century. Not much bigger than a kayak and as apparently seaworthy as a bathtub, it might explain the historically high attrition rate in the fishing industry.
Agnes steps sure-footedly into the boat and immediately volunteers to help sail the thing. I follow more hesitantly, hoping Niall knows what he’s doing. There’s no cabin in which to shelter should the weather turn. Where are the lifejackets? I feel faintly nauseous and, remembering our first ferry trip to the island, hope that Agnes’s nonchalance and my limited reserves of maternal patience won’t be tested by another bout of her seasickness.
He starts the outboard motor and we head straight out towards Auchwinnie. Agnes stands in the back of the boat, her hand shading her eyes in salute, hair streaming in the chill breeze, an elfin figurehead. She points out number 19, the school, Ailsa’s cottage, the Campbells’ place, the Big House, as Finnverinnity shrinks into the horizon and Beinn Mammor, with a scattering of snow at its peak, dwindles to a hillock.
“The snow’s like doughnut sugar!” says Agnes, then turns to Niall to explain: “That’s a metaphor.”
“No, honey,” I tell her. “That’s a simile—another figure of speech, like a metaphor only different.”
We head west, past the twin rock bird colonies of Plodda and Grodda on our left, crowded and noisy as a nightmare housing project. Niall shuts off the engine and Agnes scrambles to help him tighten the sail.
“The important thing,” he tells her, “is to work out the direction of the wind. You can’t sail directly into it.”
“Why not?”
“You just can’t do it,” he says. “The game would be up.”
She nods, enthralled by the possibility of peril. I, meanwhile, silently rejoice in the calm sea and the gentle wind that is just strong enough to stiffen the sails.
Once we’ve left the citadels of screaming gannets behind, a soothing silence washes over us. Soon we pass the creamy strip of Lusnaharra beach on our right or, as Agnes now knows to call it, starboard.
“So Finnverinnity, our port, is on our starboard side now and the bird islands were on our port side?” she checks.
Niall nods. “You’ve got it,” he says.
The ridged earthworks of the Neolithic village above Lusnaharra are plainly visible from the boat, and we can just make out the scaffolding round the former Catholic church and ill-fated Tempull Beag Arts Centre and Tea Room, which has just been bought by a Danish retail magnate. He plans to set up a micro-distillery and, in a nod to island history, he told the Auchwinnie Pibroch he will call the single malt “Father Col’s Special Reserve.”
Agnes points out Oonagh’s farm.
“The sheep look like spilled popcorn or something on the hill from here,” she says. Then she turns to me. “Another metaphor? Right, Mom?”
“Another simile. If it uses the comparing words ‘like’ or ‘as,’ it’s a simile.”
Niall hands her the tiller.
“So I just steer straight on?” she checks.
“Yes. Keep her steady. I’ll let you know when we have to change our course.”
She frowns, transfixed by responsibility.
“What’s that orange ball in the water?” she points.
“It’s a buoy,” I say.
“Why’s it a boy and not a girl?”
I’ll save the spelling lesson for later. Agnes isn’t pressing for an answer because there’s a new and exciting distraction. A sleek, moustachioed grey head has popped up by the side of the boat.
“Wow! A seal! He’s so cute. Like a little puppy. Can we feed him?”
“Not a good idea,” says Niall, taking over the tiller. “We don’t want to teach them bad habits like begging. They should get their food in their own way.”
She reddens as if rebuked.
We’re rounding the headland past the mouth of the Cannioch River—Invercannioch the map says—and heading north now, following the line of the coast to the mighty Doonmara cliffs where more birds, seagulls and solan geese, wheel above us and call from their rocky perches.
Further north, out to sea, there is a distant agitation in the water and a faint, ominous roar. The Carracorry whirlpool.
“It’s the fourth largest whirlpool in the world,” Niall tells us. “Geologists say it’s caused by the tidal race running over a large underwater chasm and several basalt pinnacles rising from the seabed. Folklore says it’s caused by the old goddess of winter, Cailleach Bheur, washing her enormous kilt in the sea.”
“Folklore’s so dumb,” Agnes says.
“Maybe. But these are stories people told themselves before science was invented to explain the world. They have value too.”
“Okay,” she concedes. “It’s dumb, but it’s kind of fun.”
Niall drops the anchor and ties up on a spit of rock under the Calasay cliffs. Somewhere up there is McWatt’s grave, marked by a driftwood cross. We clamber ashore on the strip of machair and Agnes spreads out the hideous teddy-bear tablecloth on the beach, smoothing it carefully.
“Do you think your poet picnicked here?” she asks me.
“What do you think, Niall? You knew him,” I say, setting out the food.
“Well…I don’t think he was much of a picnic man.”
We eat—oatcakes, cheese, fruit and chocolate, the best I could do from Finnverinnity store—in contented silence, looking out to sea. Once we’ve packed away the remnants, shaken the tablecloth and cleared away the last scraps of orange peel, Agnes gets out her plastic container and goes off in search of some fresh shells for her collection.
Niall and I watch her skip through the grass to the water’s edge and our talk turns personal. He asks about Marco and I give what I hope is a wry haiku account of our courtship, parenthood and break-up. Wry but acid-free, is the intention. Bitterness, hard to avoid, is so unattractive.
“He’s a good person. Hard-working. Loves his daughter. Loved me. Once,” I say with an even-handedness that almost persuades me. “I loved him. It just didn’t work out.”
Then it’s Niall’s turn. He talks about his partner, currently based in Auchwinnie for work, and I manage to conceal my frisson of disappointment.
“We’ve been together for two years,” he says. “We hope to live together on the island eve
ntually but it’s difficult. We can only manage a weekend a month at the moment.”
“What does she do?” I ask.
“He. He’s an archaeologist.”
We look up as a shadow passes over us, cast by a huge bird.
“Iolar mara. Sea eagle,” says Niall.
It gives me time to recover. How did I not guess? Most kind, attentive, halfway presentable men of my acquaintance are gay. Most of my male friends. What happened to my New Yorker’s infallible antennae? Did I honestly think there were no homosexuals in Fascaray?
“Interesting work,” I say. “Especially round here. I hope I get to meet him.”
“You will.”
If Niall has noticed my discomfort, he isn’t letting on.
Agnes calls to us: “Mom! Mr. Kennedy! Look!”
She points towards the horizon where two dark crescents rise and fall through the waves, stitching the sea.
Dolphins.
“They’re playing!” she shouts.
We watch, entranced, until they’re out of sight, then she races back to us, rattling her box of shells.
“I got a pink razor clam, like a witch’s fingernail,” she says.
Niall unties the boat, pulls up the anchor and we set off for home. The sea is restless as we pass the Ring of Drumnish, its standing stones gaunt and jagged against the scudding clouds.
“Broken teeth, Mom? Right?”
“Right.”
She turns.
“Look, Mom!”
She is pointing out to sea towards a cluster of eight large circular tanks ringed by rails.
“Merry-go-rounds for mermaids,” she laughs.
This metaphor kick has got to stop.
It’s the Fascaray Salmon Farm, set up by Eck Campbell a decade ago with his wife Isa and son Andy. It’s a small-scale business compared to the vast industrial fish tanks out beyond Plodda and Grodda that are owned and operated by a Norwegian corporation.
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