edinburgh university press scottish modernism and its contexts 1918-1959 literature national identity and cultural exchange may 2009

Scottish Modernism
and its Contexts 1918–1959
Literature, National Identity and Cultural Exchange
Margery Palmer McCulloch

Scottish Modernism and its Contexts
1918–1959

For Ian
who is also a Scottish modernist

Scottish Modernism and its
Contexts 1918–1959
Literature, National Identity and Cultural

Exchange
Margery Palmer McCulloch
Edinburgh University Press

© Margery Palmer McCulloch, 2009
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh
www.euppublishing.com
Typeset in Janson
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 3474 3 (hardback)
The right of Margery Palmer McCulloch
to be identi ed as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: Modernism and Scottish Modernism 1
Part I Transforming Traditions
1 Towards a Scottish Modernism: C. M. Grieve, Little 11
Magazines and the Movement for Renewal
2 Hugh MacDiarmid and Modernist Poetry in Scots 29
3 Criticism and New Writing in English 53
4 Beyond this Limit: Women, Modernism and the Modern 68
World
Part II Ideology and Literature

5 Whither Scotland? Politics and Society between the Wars 93
6 Neil M. Gunn: Re-imagining the Highlands 113
7 Modernism and Littérature Engagée: A Scots Quair and City 131
Fiction
8 Poetry and Politics 154
Part III World War Two and its Aftermath
9 Visionaries and Revisionaries: Late Muir and MacDiarmid 169
10 Continuities and New Voices 198
Bibliography of Works Cited 216
Index 223

Acknowledgements
I would like to express my thanks to staff at Glasgow University Library,
the National Library of Scotland, the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, and
the Poetry Library, Edinburgh for their helpfulness, and to the several
research colleagues who have willingly answered queries or offered addi-
tional information. I am especially grateful to Dr Gerard Carruthers,
Head of the Department of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University,
for continuing academic and conference support. Much encouragement
for this Scottish modernist project has been provided by members of the
recently established Scottish Network of Modernist Studies (SNOMS),
and by the enthusiasm of international delegates at Modernist Magazines
conferences in Leicester and Le Mans. My thanks are due also to the
editorial staff at Edinburgh University Press and, as always, to Ian and
Euan for practical help.

Liberté j’écris ton nom
Paul Eluard
Don’t put ‘N. B.’ on your paper; put Scotland
and be done with it [. . .] The name of my native

land is not North Britain, whatever may be the name of yours.
Robert Louis Stevenson


Introduction: Modernism and
Scottish Modernism
There cannot be a revival in the real sense of the word [. . .] unless these
potentialities are in accord with the newest tendencies of human thought.
C. M. Grieve, Scottish Chapbook (1923)
In a review article in the Athenaeum in 1919 T. S. Eliot posed the question
‘Was there a Scottish literature?’, rapidly concluding that there was not,
since Scotland had neither a single language nor a suf ciently unfragmented
literary history to entitle it to claim what he called a distinctive ‘Scotch lit-
erature’.
1
If Eliot were alive today, his question might well be ‘Was there a
Scottish modernism?’; and many academic scholars and critics – Scottish as
well as non-Scottish – would probably join him in doubting that there was
any such thing. A perusal of critical studies of modernism in the past twenty
to thirty years, including the most recent, will rarely reveal a listing of ‘Hugh
MacDiarmid’ in their indexes, while the potential Scottish modernist territory
as a whole remains unexplored. Similarly, studies of early twentieth-century
writing in Scotland seldom have the word ‘modernism’ in their indexes. On
the surface, then, it might appear that there was no manifestation of literary
modernism worthy of discussion in that part of the United Kingdom which
in the early twentieth century was still called North Britain.
This study starts from the dual premise that there was and still is a varied
and distinctive Scottish literature interacting with both traditional and inter-
national in uences; and that there was in the post-1918 period a Scottish liter-
ary modernism drawing on artistic in uences from European modernism and

rooted in the desire to recover a self-determining identity for Scotland both
culturally and politically. The book’s purpose is therefore a positive one which
seeks to situate Scottish culture in the modernist context of the early twentieth
century by expanding the existing limited and potentially inward-looking idea
of an interwar ‘Scottish Renaissance’ movement to include its international
signi cance as a Scottish manifestation of modernism. In addition, and in
common with what is happening currently in other areas of modernist studies,
the conventional boundaries of modernism will be extended in order to con-
sider a late or transitional Scottish modernism, especially in poetry, in the
1940s and 1950s.While the primary aim of the study is therefore to further

2 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959
awareness and understanding of Scottish culture, it is hoped that it will also
assist in the ongoing international project of expanding perceptions of mod-
ernism more generally through its documentation of the Scottish experience
and the ways in which artistic experimentation and a response to ‘the new’ can
simultaneously interact with political and social agendas, thus allowing the
modernist artist a more active role in a changing world.
As these previous comments imply, modernism as a movement has been
undergoing fresh critical scrutiny and interpretation in recent years, with the
earlier ‘high modernism’ emphasis on avant-garde artistic experimentation
and withdrawal from direct involvement in social and political affairs being
replaced by an understanding that there were in fact many modernisms and
that their distinguishing qualities could, and did, vary, depending on the con-
ditions of place and time. In the Anglophone literary scene, for example, it is
noticeable that the focus has now expanded from the group of male authors
whom Wyndham Lewis characterised as ‘the men of 1914’ – Ezra Pound,
T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and Lewis himself – to include a fuller consideration of
participants in the early decades of the century. This includes the contribution
made by women writers and the importance of American modernist move-

ments such as the Harlem Renaissance in addition to previously recognised
poets such as William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. Reassessment is
also taking place in relation to the creative work of the 1930s, long character-
ised in critical discussion as the period of the ‘Auden generation’ and a marker
of the supposed end of modernism.
2
As with historical transnational cultural
movements such as the Renaissance or Romanticism, it is not really possible
to pin down precisely an end or a beginning to what is now known as modern-
ism. Some cultural critics would put the starting point in the later nineteenth
century, with the work of Impressionist painters in France, the in uential
drama of Ibsen in Norway, the  ction of James and Conrad in England and the
poetry of Whitman in America. Others would see its beginnings even earlier in
the developments of the mid-century, with the crisis of belief which took place
then as a result of increasing industrialisation and its disruption of traditional
social patterns; with the loss of religious faith brought about, at least in part, by
Darwin’s evolutionary theories and by geological discoveries about the nature
of the physical world. Just as new political and social practices had to come
into being to deal with the human and social actuality of this changing world,
so new art forms had to be created to give it expression, and new philosophical
and intellectual approaches had to be developed to analyse its implications and
possibilities. Some of the writers and thinkers who signi cantly in uenced the
art and ideas of the early years of the twentieth century, such as Nietzsche and
Dostoevsky, came from this mid-nineteenth-century period, entering into the
later and wider public perception through translation of their work. Scottish
writers such as Edwin Muir and Hugh MacDiarmid were both in uenced by
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky while Virginia Woolf described the latter as ‘this
great genius who is beginning to permeate our lives so curiously’.
3
In her essay

‘Character in Fiction’ (1924), Woolf also designated 1910 as the year in which

Introduction 3
it seemed to her that the human character itself changed, her marker of the
arrival of modernism. This was the year of the major post-Impressionist exhi-
bition of paintings in London (soon to be followed by its in uential showing
at the Armory in New York), an exhibition in which the iconoclastic work of
artists such as Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso seemed to capture the
unfamiliar identity of a newly arrived and still strange, modern world.
Wherever modernism’s beginnings are seen to be situated, it is undeniable
that by the early years of the twentieth century terms such as ‘modernity’ or
‘the modern’ or ‘the new’ had established themselves as de ning terminology
for the new age. In London, The New Age journal under the editorship of A.
R. Orage became a principal line of communication for the new ideas and
art forms being developed in Britain and internationally. This journal was
an important educational medium for Scottish autodidacts such as Muir and
MacDiarmid, both of whom became regular contributors, Muir in the World
War One period, MacDiarmid in the mid-1920s. The American Ezra Pound
arrived in London in 1908 and immediately began to activate a critical and
creative revolution through his own writing, the little magazines he edited
or became involved with, and the avant-garde writers he championed such as
his fellow American T. S. Eliot who settled in London in 1915. The Italian
Futurist, Marinetti, took London by storm in 1914 and inspired, in response,
the short-lived Blast magazine founded by Pound and Wyndham Lewis,
together with their Vorticist movement: activities monitored with interest
by MacDiarmid during his war service in Salonika. The French philosopher
Henri Bergson, author of Creative Evolution, lectured internationally on his
theories of memory and personality, including lectures in Edinburgh in 1914
which were reported in the Glasgow Herald and Scotsman newspapers, while
Sigmund Freud’s writings about the unconscious mind and James Frazer’s

anthropological theories became increasingly in uential. On the continent,
Paris developed as the principal centre of an avant-garde visual art which
interacted with music, ballet and literature. One notable peak of this ferment
of creativity was reached in 1913 in the performance by Diaghilev’s Ballet
Russe of The Rite of Spring to the music of Stravinsky and designs by Picasso:
a performance of primitive power which caused a public furore on its opening
night. This pre-1914 modernism was thus marked by its international nature,
its culturally interactive nature, and by its metropolitan nature. For this was
a cultural movement centred on large European cities, including London,
bringing together artists and intellectuals who were responding to the chal-
lenges of the modern age. And at this point in the century, these challenges
were taken up with energy and exhilaration – even with a violent exuberance
– with a sense of active participation in the making of a new world. Marinetti
and the Futurists embraced the new world of technology and the speed of
the machine; the anarchist movement was idealistic in a way that is foreign to
our present-day perceptions of anarchism; and in the years before the 1917
Revolution, artists in Russia such as Malevich and Tatlin were insisting and
demonstrating that artists could also be the transformers of their societies.

4 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959
Scotland too had a modernist presence in the pre-1914 years. Although
Scottish poetry and  ction were in decline as a result of increasing
Anglicisation, the visual arts were prospering and interacting with develop-
ments in Europe as Scottish painters travelled and exhibited internationally,
bringing new forms into their own work. J. D. Fergusson  rst went to Paris
in the late 1890s, before setting up an atelier there in 1905 and becoming
involved with the many international artists who had made their home in the
city. Like the painters who became known along with himself as the ‘Scottish
Colourists’ (S. J. Peploe, F. C. B. Cadell and Leslie Hunter), Fergusson also
lived for periods in the south of France, in Nice and Antibes, and came under

the in uence of the southern light as well as of post-Impressionist move-
ments. He later co-operated with Middleton Murry in the publication of his
Rhythm magazine, acting as Art Editor between 1914 and 1916 and producing
striking modern covers for the magazine. These early years of the century
also saw a  ourishing of the arts in Glasgow when the Art School underwent
a period of revival under its director Francis (‘Fra’) Newbery. This artistic
activity was related to the innovative Arts and Crafts movement in Scotland
at the turn of the century and was especially strong in female designers and
painters such as Jessie M. King, Margaret and Frances Macdonald, Bessie
MacNicol and Newbery’s wife Jessie who established a revolutionary (in
artistic terms) Department of Embroidery at Glasgow School of Art. The
architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh was the outstanding modernist of this
group of Glasgow artists, designing the Glasgow School of Art building and
bringing his awareness of new forms into all his design work. Mackintosh, the
Macdonald sisters and Herbert McNair exhibited to acclaim at the Vienna
Secession exhibitions and in Turin, while Bessie MacNicol, Jessie M. King
and other women artists also exhibited in Vienna and elsewhere in Europe.
From 1904, the art dealer Alexander Reid’s gallery – La Société des Beaux
Arts – was situated in West George Street in Glasgow, bringing Impressionist
paintings to the city which were bought by wealthy business men and acquired
by Kelvingrove Art Gallery. Reid himself had his portrait painted on several
occasions by Van Gogh. However, unlike the literary modernism which was
to develop in the post-1918 period, this earlier visual arts  owering did not
have an ideological or national renewal element in its innovatory artistic work
which might have sustained it in adverse circumstances, and it did not survive
World War One. By the end of the war European exhibiting connections
had been disrupted, artists began to go their individual ways, most often out
of Scotland, and economic decline made it all too clear that Glasgow was no
longer the ‘second city of the Empire’. Reid’s gallery continued to sell French
Impressionist paintings during the early 1920s, along with paintings by the

Scottish Colourists, but public taste changed, there was not the same interest
in post-Impressionist work, and the gallery’s business moved to the London
 rm Reid and Lefevre in 1928.
4
This disruption of the Scottish visual arts situation patterned in some
respects the effect of the outbreak of war on the early and celebratory phase

Introduction 5
of European modernism itself. The previous self-chosen emigration of artists
and intellectuals to the international creativity of European metropolitan cul-
tural centres was transformed into a philosophical exile of lost idealism as well
as an actual displacement of peoples from destroyed homes and destroyed
national identities as frontiers changed as a result of ‘peace’ settlements. The
experience of World War One – a war unlike any previous European war
in terms of human carnage and civilian involvement – was an unexpected
and diabolic manifestation of the potentiality of the new world so recently
celebrated. It was thus a powerful in uence on the character of the phase of
modernist artistic expression which developed in the post-1918 period. In a
pre-war essay on Cavalcanti, Ezra Pound, talking of the need to revitalise the
art of poetry, had commented that ‘we appear to have lost the radiant world
where one thought cuts through another with a clear edge’.
5
In the after-
shock of the war, it was clear that the loss of the radiant world had taken on
more widespread and sinister cultural, social and political implications. T. S.
Eliot, discussing James Joyce’s in uential and experimental novel Ulysses in
1923, placed it in a context of ‘the immense panorama of futility and anarchy
which is contemporary history’.
6
Eliot’s own fragmented long poem The

Waste Land, published in the previous year, was ‘celebrated’ by many of its
readers as a paradigm of just such a futility, both in its dif culty of interpre-
tation and the negativity of its message once interpreted: a negativity which
appeared to give formal expression to their own sense of despair.
This post-1918 situation was the context in which a new Scottish modern-
ism – this time literature-led and ideological in nature – was born. It was given
impulse by the journalist and poet C. M. Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) who
returned from war service in Europe determined to make a name for himself
as a writer of consequence and determined also to  nd a way to regenerate
both his country’s literature and its capacity for self-determination. The little
magazines he edited from the small east-coast town of Montrose on his return
from the war soon generated a group of activists willing to support him in his
self-appointed task, including the writers Neil M. Gunn, Edwin and Willa
Muir, Catherine Carswell, and in the 1930s Lewis Grassic Gibbon, together
with the musician Francis George Scott and the painters William McCance
and William Johnstone, who, although they were forced to  nd their living
outside Scotland, were supportive of the new initiatives. The revival move-
ment itself became popularly known as the ‘Scottish Renaissance’ and this
terminology has lasted through to our own time as the signi er of an inter-
war literary movement with several adherents but centred primarily on the
poetry and nationalist politics of Hugh MacDiarmid. While such a percep-
tion has some truth in it in relation to MacDiarmid’s prominence, artistically
and polemically, it offers a partial view which ignores both the diversity and
strength of other participants and the interactive, outward-looking nature of
Scottish culture in this period. Tom Nairn’s in uential book The Break-up
of Britain (1979) which considers MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the
Thistle to be the expression of a delayed Scottish Romantic nationalism, has

6 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959
encouraged a focus on what some critics have seen as a national essentialism

in the movement, a looking backwards and inwards as opposed to the moder-
nity and internationalism of the context in which these Scottish Renaissance
writers considered themselves to be working. What is needed for a more
accurate understanding of this important period in Scottish literary culture
is a return to the writings of the participants in the movement and so to an
understanding of how they perceived their relationship with the world in
which they operated. For these writers were in no doubt that what they were
engaged in was a modern project. Edwin Muir’s  rst published book was
titled We Moderns (1918); MacDiarmid’s editorials in his Scottish Chapbook,
founded in 1922, consistently used the word ‘modern’ and emphasised that
‘there cannot be a revival in the real sense of the word [. . .] unless these
potentialities are in accord with the newest tendencies of human thought’.
7

One of Catherine Carswell’s earliest essays was on Marcel Proust (1923) and
she was a supportive reviewer of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913) and
The Rainbow (1915), and a regular correspondent until his death. Her memoir
of Lawrence, The Savage Pilgrimage, was published in 1932. In addition, for
these post-World War One writers and their supporters, nationalism and
internationalism were two sides of the one coin, not opposing positions, while
in the national context they believed that any lasting artistic revival must be
accompanied by renewal in the life of the nation as a whole. They were not
in the business of a narrow ‘art for art’s sake’ or of a narrow nationalism, but
were seeking to reach out from an aesthetically and politically revitalised
Scotland to interact with the international scene.
A primary aim of this book, therefore, is to resituate the Scottish revival
of the post-1918 period in the context of the Anglophone and European
modernism of the early twentieth century, and in the context of how it was
perceived by its principal activists in its own time. Such a context will allow a
wider, less fragmented and less insular view of Scottish cultural developments

in the postwar period, including Scottish responses to modernity – to philo-
sophical, ideological and technological as well as artistic change – alongside
more speci cally national questions. This Scottish modernism, on the other
hand, is not entirely synonymous with what we have become used to calling
the Scottish Renaissance, although it is closely related to it. The Scottish
Renaissance movement included many supporters who were encouraged by
the new optimistic atmosphere to work for change in Scotland both politically
and artistically or behind the scenes as ‘enablers’. Not all such activities could
be characterised as ‘modernist’, even in an expanded sense. The journalist
William Power was one such enabler, both behind the scenes and in print
through articles and editorials, as were the writers F. Marian McNeill and
Helen Cruickshank. Alexander Gray took up the international and the Scots-
language challenge by translating German and Danish ballads into Scots, thus
bringing to attention similarities between the European and Scottish ballad
traditions. Gray’s focus, on the other hand, was on accuracy of translation and
on a shared heritage. He was not a modernist ‘re-creator’, or ‘transformer’,

Introduction 7
such as MacDiarmid or Pound. Similarly, John Buchan was an early supporter
of the new movement, appearing as poet in MacDiarmid’s  rst Northern
Numbers anthology and writing the foreword to his collection of Scots lyrics,
Sangschaw. Yet as Buchan’s introduction to his own historical anthology of
Scottish poetry The Northern Muse (published like Sangschaw in 1925) makes
clear, he, as with Stevenson before him, did not believe that there was a future
for Scots-language poetry and so his anthology is valedictory as opposed to
forward-looking, while his own poetry is traditional rather than experimen-
tal. This non-modernistic involvement is true of several writers in the period
who contributed to the recovery of Scots as a literary language by revitalising
existing traditions as opposed to being in uenced by contemporary modernist
writing. And while in the 1930s, Lewis Grassic Gibbon developed a modern-

ist  ctional form and innovative use of Scots which matched MacDiarmid’s
experiments in poetry, and adapted this to deal with the depiction of the
proletarian city, not all new  ction writers associated with the literary revival
who wrote about the contemporary world could be considered as modernist
writers. For example, Eric Linklater’s 1930s novel Magnus Merriman provides
an ironic, at times farcical, account of the political and artistic performances
of Scottish Renaissance activists with a barely disguised MacDiarmid in the
character of Hugh Skene. Yet Linklater’s  ction, although admired by many
readers, is by nature picaresque rather than consciously challenging in order
to build something new (artistically or politically). Despite some ‘modern’
themes, it cannot be considered ‘modernist’ writing. In addition, drama was
an art form struggling to  nd an identity in the early decades of the century,
and its priorities were survival rather than competition with the modernist
drama of Europe. Such quali cations mean that although the present study
will attempt to provide the contexts out of which a Scottish modernism of the
post-1918 period developed and in which it operated, the writers selected for
speci c discussion will be those who consciously sought to  nd new forms in
their creative work both for artistic purposes and in order to critique and give
expression to the changing, modern world around them. This is therefore
not an historical account of Scottish writing published in the period, but an
account of what I would see as Scotland’s contribution to the phase of modern-
ist culture which developed after the ending of World War One.
One of the more provocative aspects of the study may be its extension into
the late 1950s in order to take account of the late poetry of Edwin Muir and
Hugh MacDiarmid as well as new poetry in the 1940s and 1950s. While the
early revolutionary and optimistic phase of the literary revival had come to an
end by the late 1930s, and the outbreak of war (as in World War One) brought
many writing careers as well as lives to an end, the narrative of this Scottish con-
tribution to modernism is left incomplete if it does not include this late phase.
Several of the poets who came to attention in the 1940s drew on the legacy of

MacDiarmid’s revitalisation of Scots as a modern literary language and on the
ideas behind the revival movement, although experimenting with these in u-
ences in new ways. A poet such as Sydney Goodsir Smith, for example, was an

8 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959
outstanding new late modernist writer in Scots, while Sorley MacLean brought
the long-awaited development of Gaelic as a modern – and modernist – liter-
ary language to fruition with his Dàin do Eimhir (Poems to Eimhir) published by
William Maclellan of Glasgow in 1943. Maclellan also published a new series of
little magazines and poetry anthologies in the 1940s which supported the new
poetry, as well as publishing MacDiarmid’s In Memoriam James Joyce in 1955.
The late poetry of Muir and MacDiarmid is also left in limbo by the percep-
tion of a Scottish literary revival that ended in 1939. Muir took a long time to
mature as poet, although his strong reputation as critic dates from the World
War One period. Yet his most achieved and innovative modern poetry comes in
the 1940s and 1950s under the pressure of what he called this ‘single, disunited
world’.
8
MacDiarmid’s dif culty in  nding publishing outlets after the out-
break of war and his consequent abstracting, borrowing and collaging practices
have resulted in him being considered by some critics as a proto-postmodernist
writer as opposed to the continuing modernist poet the visionary nature of his
objectives and the initial context of his compositions might well show him to
be. For all these reasons, it seems relevant to propose a Scottish modernism
which extends selectively from the publication of Edwin Muir’s We Moderns
in 1918 to his death in 1959, and which thus takes in late work by the writers
associated with the principal phase of the movement as well as new voices which
draw on its in uences. The study will begin with a chapter on C. M. Grieve
(Hugh MacDiarmid), his correspondence from Salonika and Marseilles during
the war, and the little magazines he founded and edited in the early 1920s, thus

initiating this Scottish contribution to literary modernism.
Notes
1. Eliot, ‘Was There a Scottish Literature?’, The Athenaeum, 1 August 1919,
pp. 680–1; reprinted in McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, pp. 7–10.
2. As, for example, in Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation.
3. Woolf, review of Feodor Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband, trans. Constance
Garnett, Times Literary Supplement, 22 February 1917, p. 91. McCulloch (ed.),
Modernism and Nationalism, p. 162.
4. See Frances Fowle, ‘Art Dealing in Glasgow Between the Wars: The Rise and Fall
of La Société des Beaux-Arts’, Journal of the Scottish Society for Art History, vol. 12
(2007).
5. Ezra Pound, ‘Cavalcanti’, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, p. 124.
6. Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’, The Dial, November 1923, p. 483.
7. Grieve, ‘A Theory of Scots Letters’, Scottish Chapbook, February 1923, p. 182.
McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism, p. 26.
8. Muir, An Autobiography, p. 194.

Part I
Transforming Traditions


Chapter 1
Towards a Scottish Modernism:
C. M. Grieve, Little Magazines and
the Movement for Renewal
None of those signi cant little periodicals – crude, absurd, enthusiastic, vital
– have yet appeared in Auchtermuchty or Ardnamurchan. No new publish-
ing houses have sprung up mushroom-like [. . .] It is discouraging to re ect
that this is not the way the Dadaists go about the business!
C. M. Grieve, Scottish Chapbook (1922)

Christopher Murray Grieve was born and brought up in the small town of
Langholm in the Scottish Borders. He enlisted in the war in late 1915 and
after a period of training was posted to Salonika in Macedonia with the Royal
Army Medical Corps, arriving at the 42nd General Hospital there in August
1916. A record of his war service and – more important for the poet Hugh
MacDiarmid he was to become – a record of his psychological and intellectual
development during these years is provided by the series of letters he wrote
from Greece and later from France to George Ogilvie, his former English
teacher at Broughton Junior Student Centre in Edinburgh. Grieve’s letters to
Ogilvie continued after the war, through the development of what came to be
known as the Scottish Renaissance movement and into the early 1930s, thus
offering what might be seen as the ‘growth of a [Scottish] poet’s mind’. At this
early stage, however, the European correspondence of the war years charts
Grieve’s gradual progress towards his postwar role as modernist editor and
poet by way of a multiplicity of eclectic reading and writing projects, while at
the same time capturing his early interest in the cultural avant-garde.
1
The principal  ghting in Greece was over when Grieve’s unit arrived in
the summer of 1916. It appears from his letters that once his various duties
at the hospital and as quartermaster were ful lled, he had considerable time
left over for reading and thinking about his future plans. Indeed, ‘thinking’
– in Salonika as throughout his life – appears to have been an obsession and
something of a trial to Grieve whose thoughts, like those of his future poetic
persona the Drunk Man, tended to ‘circle like hobby-horses’.
2
As a  edgling
newspaper reporter in Wales in 1911, he had written to Ogilvie about his
overactive brain: ‘I wish some device could be patented whereby my  ying
thoughts could be photographed: that might give me a chance to express my
present mental stage with some adequacy’ (Letters, p. 6). Now,  ve years later,

12 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959
he was still trying to bring order to thoughts threatening to overwhelm him.
He wrote in a long letter of 20 August 1916:
[M]y thoughts are thus forever like a man moving through the ever-increasing
and various confusion of an enormous higgledy-piggledy lumber-room [. . .] But I
cannot get that breathing space. Nor can I hit on any super shorthand to keep pace
with my continuing mental ‘spate’ and make up back-time. (Letters, p. 11)
Grieve had left Broughton Student Centre without taking a teaching quali ca-
tion, and his letters give the impression of a young man of enormous ambition,
but of as yet unfocused talent, an enthusiastic and eclectic reader, pouncing on
whatever is new and intellectually and artistically challenging. He is anxious to
compete with the authors he reads, but at the same time appears psychologi-
cally insecure, despite the con dent, even arrogant, persona adopted in many
of the letters; uncertain that he will ever be able to  nd a way to give expression
to the latent creativity he feels he has within him.
These letters are interesting not only for the light they throw on the
psychology of their immature writer-to-be, but also for the information they
contain about Grieve’s reading material in the war years and the proposed
projects deriving from it. One series of Scottish studies concerns Scottish
visual art, a topic of continuing interest throughout his life and one which at
this point indicates his growing interest in Wyndham Lewis and avant-garde
developments as well as implicitly looking forward to the visual quality in the
imagery of his future Scots-language poetry:
I have my The Scottish Vortex (as per system exempli ed in Blast), Caricature in
Scotland – and lost opportunities, A Copy of Burns I want (suggestions to illustrators
on a personal visualization of the national pictures evoked in the poems), Scottish
Colour-Thought (a study of the aesthetic condition of Scottish nationality in the
last three centuries) and The Alienation of Our Artistic Ability (the factors which
prevent the formation of a ‘national’ school and drive our artists to other lands and

to ‘foreign portrayal’). (Letters, p. 9)
Such Scottish projects – or as he calls them, his ‘Scots Bureau’ (Letters, p. 20)
– are documented as a part only (‘extracted from my notebook at random’)
of his ‘ceaseless reading, wide as the world of books, in every conceivable
subject’, while his interests range ‘from gardening to bacteriology and from
fox-hunting to scienti c indexing – I have planned books and articles on a
thousand and one topics’ (Letters, pp. 8, 14). Such mental tentacles might
certainly be seen to stretch forward to the author of the late intellectual and
cultural collage of In Memoriam James Joyce, but there is as yet little to suggest
the instigator of a vernacular literary revival in the years immediately after
World War One. These letters to Ogilvie are notable for the absence of ver-
nacular Scots in his writing, despite his Borders upbringing. (Like the letters
of the eighteenth-century Burns, Grieve’s wartime correspondence appears
to be the product of a carefully constructed persona.) Similarly, despite the
fact that ‘most of my reading comes from “The Soldiers’ Recreation Friend,

Towards a Scottish Modernism 13
29 Drumsheugh Gardens, Edinburgh”’ (Letters, p. 24), he mentions no
Scottish periodicals alongside the English, Irish and European magazines
which were part of his regular reading material. Grieve would appear to have
been at least one Scottish soldier for whom the British war propaganda in
Blackwood’s Magazine was not required reading.
3
On the other hand, what is relevant to Grieve’s future situation as a
Scottish modernist is his interest in the cultural avant-garde and his increas-
ing awareness of and identi cation with European artistic movements, as
well as his recognition of the importance of Ezra Pound and Wyndham
Lewis in the London avant-garde scene. Grieve had been introduced by
Ogilvie to The New Age under the editorship of A. R. Orage when he was at
Broughton, and had himself contributed an article ‘The Young Astrology’

in 1911, when he was nineteen. As with Edwin Muir, whose  rst book We
Moderns (1918) began life as a series of articles in Orage’s magazine, The New
Age had acted, and continued to act, as a kind of ‘Open University’ in rela-
tion to Grieve’s post-school education in philosophy, European literature,
and contemporary artistic, intellectual, scienti c and social ideas. Now in
Greece, and later in France, his reading included not only The New Age and
other English periodicals such as The Spectator, Nation, and English Review,
together with the Irish Dublin Review and Dublin Leader, but also modern
writers such as the American Henry James, the Irish playwright J. M. Synge
and the Russians Maxim Gorky and the earlier Ivan Turgenev. From 1918
onwards, such contemporary references predominate in his correspondence.
He continues his early interest in Wyndham Lewis by discussing the Little
Review’s obscenity problems with his short story ‘Cantleman’s Spring-Mate’
(‘The case of “Cantleman” was taken into court in New York and brilliantly
and humorously defended, but to no avail’, Letters, p. 20); and refers also to
Emily Dickinson, Rebecca West and the Sitwells as well as to composers such
as Debussy, Stravinsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. La Revue Trans-Macedonienne
as well as La Vie Parisienne and Le Rêve have been added to his periodical
reading. He writes that he is reading ‘in the original a big anthology of con-
temporary French Poets and am in communication now with Paul Valéry,
André Gide, Albert Samhain and a few others’ (Letters, p. 33). His travels
include visits to the French/Spanish border area, to Lourdes, to Biarritz, and
to Paris.
By December 1918, therefore, when Grieve is waiting impatiently in
Marseilles for demobilisation, there are more de nite signs of the editor
and writer he would become in the postwar years. His projects continue to
multiply: ‘It is better to be an electric current for  ve years than a vegetable
for  fty’, he writes to Ogilvie on 27 December (Letters, p. 30). His ideas,
however, appear more focused, and his own creative writing occupies a
higher pro le in the activities planned. He is negotiating for the publication

of a small poetry collection titled A Voice from Macedonia, and is continuing
with plans for a trilogy of novels. His atmospheric sketch ‘Casualties’ is to
be published in the Broughton Magazine in the summer of 1919. He writes

14 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959
also of a completed study ‘Triangular’ which is ‘an essay in futurism’ (Letters,
p. 33). What is interesting in relation to the speci cally Scottish situation is
that he is now beginning to make contact with other Scottish writers, some of
whom are, like himself, ex-pupils of Ogilvie. The name of Roderick Watson
Kerr (the future co-founder of Porpoise Press) appears frequently in the cor-
respondence. Kerr’s war poems had been published in the English Review and
in his collection War Daubs, and Grieve is anxious for news of their reception.
Although his own war poems from Macedonia had apparently been favour-
ably received by John Buchan, they had not achieved book publication as
planned due to a number of misunderstandings and confusions (a foretaste of
many similar publishing dif culties to come). He refers also to the political
situation at home – ‘Exciting rumours of industrial happenings are trickling
through’ – and expresses a wish to be part of it (Letters, p. 34). We can see in
these later letters, therefore, the steps being taken towards the Scottish liter-
ary and national ventures which were to move centre stage from the summer
of 1919 onwards.
Grieve’s main place of residence from his demobilisation in 1919 until the
late 1920s was Montrose, a small town on the north-east coast of Scotland,
where he worked as a journalist on the Montrose Review, became elected as
an Independent Labour Party Councillor, and began his family life. It was
therefore from Montrose that he launched the ambitious programme for
cultural and national renewal that became known as the Scottish Renaissance
Movement: a Scottish modernism deriving from the periphery of a peripheral
small country, as opposed to the high modernism of a European cosmopoli-
tan metropolis.

4
His  rst venture was a series of anthologies of contempo-
rary Scottish poetry titled Northern Numbers, modelled on Edward Marsh’s
Georgian Poetry anthologies. Although Marsh’s anthologies could not be
considered as avant-garde, Grieve had read and admired them during his war
service and was impressed by their popularity with readers. His Foreword to
his own  rst Northern Numbers collection, published by Foulis in Edinburgh
in 1920, stressed that it did not aim to be a comprehensive anthology of con-
temporary Scottish poetry, but consisted of ‘representative selections (chosen
by the contributors themselves) from the mainly current work of certain
Scottish poets of today’ – and he added, signi cantly, ‘and to-morrow’. This
modest ‘manifesto’ therefore looked to the future and con dence grew when
it was found to be ‘selling splendidly’.
5
The journalist and poet William Jeffrey
may even have made the  rst use of the term ‘renaissance’ to de ne the new
movement when his positive review in the Glasgow Bulletin on 17 January
1921 was titled ‘Is this a Scottish poetry renaissance?’ (p. 6). Foulis published
the second series in October 1921, with additional authors allowing Grieve to
claim in his Foreword that the contributors ‘now represent poetically every
district in Scotland including London’. By the next year, however, Foulis was
in  nancial dif culties and Grieve published the third series himself from
Montrose. Whether by coincidence or not, this third anthology appears the
most forward-looking, with several of the older, more traditional writers

Towards a Scottish Modernism 15
replaced by younger, more adventurous contributors. Grieve’s own English-
language contributions, although eye-catching, show him still struggling
linguistically and thematically to articulate his metaphysical ideas, with only
the imagistic ‘Cattle Show’ (later collected in Stony Limits of 1934) achieving

resolution. The loss of Foulis also meant that his own experimental collection
of poetry and prose, Annals of the Five Senses, which derived from his time in
Macedonia, was now without a publisher. As with the third Northern Numbers,
Grieve eventually published this collection himself from Montrose in 1923.
Grieve had achieved much since returning to Scotland in 1919, but it
was becoming increasingly clear to him that in order for any lasting renewal
movement to take place, there had to be some ‘place of exchange’, a forum
or market place for forward-looking literary and national debate and for the
presentation of new creative writing. The collapse of Foulis and the dif cul-
ties he himself was experiencing in placing his various projects only served
to emphasise the need for a more controllable outlet. In the inaugural issue
of The Scottish Chapbook,  rst discussed with Foulis in 1920, but eventually
edited and published by himself from Montrose in August 1922, he lamented
the lack in Scotland of ‘phenomena recognisable as a propaganda of ideas [. . .]
these signi cant little periodicals – crude, absurd, enthusiastic, vital’, adding:
‘it is discouraging to re ect that this is not the way the Dadaists go about the
business’.
6
Yet, although Tristan Tzara’s Dada Manifesto of 1918 may have
introduced a new phase of European avant-garde art in the postwar period,
and ‘signi cant little periodicals’ such as Blast, The Egoist and The Little
Review had launched new aesthetic ideas and creative writing in cosmopolitan
centres in these early years of the century, Grieve was ironically idealistic in
looking for them in Scotland at this time. Edinburgh was now a provincial
North British city as opposed to an Enlightenment capital, and the great
publishing days of the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s had come to an end,
although the latter magazine had enjoyed a temporary return to prosperity
in its role of purveyor of British propaganda during the war. Nor could the
generalist and conventional nature of the Scottish periodical press as a whole
offer a platform for experimental literature and innovatory polemics.

As so often in his future literary life, Grieve in this early period did not sit
down to his publishing troubles, but set about providing his own solutions.
In a letter published in the Glasgow Herald on 15 May 1922, he advertised his
intention to publish a new monthly magazine under his editorship to be called
The Scottish Chapbook, giving its aims and intended readership, and asking for
supporters to contact him. He stated his belief that
a minority in Scotland, suf ciently interested or capable of being interested in
experimental poetics, is now quite large enough to justify the publication of such a
monthly periodical as is indicated [. . .] The venture is not to be a commercial one.
It is intended to cover expenses and no more [. . .] Only a very limited number of
subscribers at 10s annually (for which they will receive the twelve monthly issues
post free) are needed. (Letters, p. 757)

16 Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959
Suf cient subscribers (including the writers Helen Cruickshank, Neil M.
Gunn and William Soutar, who also became contributors) were achieved to
launch The Scottish Chapbook in August 1922, shortly before the launch of the
Criterion under the editorship of T. S. Eliot in October of that year.
As has often been remarked, 1922 was something of an annus mirabilis
in postwar English-language literary modernism, since in addition to the
Criterion under Eliot’s editorship, the year saw the publication of James
Joyce’s Ulysses by Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare & Co. in Paris in February,
Eliot’s The Waste Land in the American magazine The Dial in November, and
the appearance in London of new  ction by D. H. Lawrence and Virginia
Woolf. To this was added in Scotland not only Grieve’s editorship of a
new mould-breaking magazine, but, even more important for the revival of
Scotland’s literary reputation, his appearance in its third issue of October
1922 as the modernist Scots-language poet ‘Hugh M’Diarmid’.
With its red cover, lion rampant cover image and motto proclaiming
‘Not Traditions – Precedents’, The Scottish Chapbook offered an uncompro-

mising platform for a ‘propaganda of ideas’. Its manifesto, The Chapbook
Programme, featured prominently in the inaugural and all subsequent issues,
and took as its motto the quotation: ‘Il far un libro meno e che niente/Se
il libro fatto non rifa la gente . . .’ (‘To make a book is less than nothing
unless the book, when made, makes people anew’).
7
Its general objective
was to ‘meddle wi’ the thistle’ and speci c aims included: ‘to encourage and
publish the work of contemporary Scottish poets and dramatists, whether in
English, Gaelic or Braid Scots’; ‘to insist upon truer evaluations of the work
of Scottish writers than are usually given in the present over-Anglicised
condition of British literary journalism, and, in criticism, elucidate, apply,
and develop the distinctively Scottish range of values’. Most importantly,
it sought ‘to bring Scottish Literature into closer touch with current
European tendencies in technique and ideation’.
8
This, then, was to be a
forward-looking movement which would not only seek to revitalise Scottish
writing in all three of Scotland’s indigenous languages, but would also seek
to bring these Scottish traditions into contact with modern European crea-
tive and intellectual ideas. And instead of lamenting Scotland’s linguistic
diversity as a hindrance to the development of a distinctive literature (as
Eliot had considered it to be in his review article ‘Was there a Scottish
literature?’), Grieve looked in his  rst Book Review column to the earlier
European example of La Jeune Belgique for a way forward in relation to the
several languages of Scotland:
What Belgium did, Scotland can do. Literary Scotland, like Belgium, is a country of
mixed nationality. Instead of two languages, Flemish and French, we have Braid Scots,
Gaelic and English. Let the exponents of these three sections in Scottish Literature
to-day make common cause as the young Belgian writers [. . .] did in La Jeune Belgique

and elsewhere; and the next decade or two will see a Scottish Renascence as swift and
irresistible as was the Belgian Revival between 1880 and 1910.
9