SUPREME IRONIES

indeed.

AN OUTSTANDING poet of international stature and an uncompromising

left-wing Nationalist, Hugh MacDiarmid was an inveterate enemy of the

capitalist establishment in London. A very gifted poet, whose talent was

unrecognised until towards the end of his life, he was the greatest poet

since Robert Burns. Thus in October 1977, the influential magazine, The

Economist, said that ''when the political and literary history of the

period comes to be written, it may well be known as the Age of Hugh

MacDiarmid''.

The greatest Scottish poet of the twentieth century, MacDiarmid

(1892-1978) was always something of an enigma. A racist and elitist, who

crashed swords with Edwin Muir and James Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic

Gibbon) in the 1920s and 1930s, he opposed socialist-humanism at the

very outset of his career.

At the very beginning, Christopher Murray Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) was

almost certainly influenced by the Clarte group in Paris. Articulating

his own racist and elitist views in his book, Above The Battle (London,

1916), Romain Rolland, one of the leading figures in the Clarte group

later on, expressed the views at the heart of MacDiarmid's own work as a

poet and political activist that ''we have chosen for protest the crimes

against things, and not against men, the destruction of works and not of

lives''.

When he reviewed my book, The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class in

Tribune in 1979, Alan Bold dismissed my revelations of MacDiarmid's

advocacy of fascism as unimportant. In an article in Cencrastus a few

years later, Raymond Ross asserted that I had not understood

MacDiarmid's ''flirtation'' with fascism. It had been a consequence of

his poetic imagination. Moreover, in his fine book, Elemental Things:

The Poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid, Harvey Oxenhorn, the American scholar,

though more critical of Scots support for Russian ''communism'', refers

to MacDiarmid's ''flirtation with Stalinism'' as if the word

''flirtation'' was an explanatory device.

In his intelligent essay on MacDiarmid on Politics in The Age of Hugh

MacDiarmid, edited by Paul H. Scott and A. C. Davis, Neal Ascherson also

played down the Scottish poet's advocacy of fascism. Contrary to the

evidence unearthed by my own research into MacDiarmid's politics,

Ascherson said that he did not assume that ''white men'' were superior

to blacks. He also denied that Grieve/MacDiarmid ''subscribed to notions

of the Judaic World-Enemy''.

However, when Bold published his definitive biography of MacDiarmid in

1988, he could no longer ignore the Scottish poet's support for

Mussolini and Hitler. In a somewhat superficial attribution of

MacDiarmid's attraction to Italian fascism in the early 1920s as

''simply another gesture of contempt for English Parliamentary

government'', Bold chose to ignore his anti-semitism and support for

Adolf Hitler. Covering up the extent of the Scottish poet's support for

fascism, Bold said: ''It is one thing for a poet committed to socialism

to overlook the proto-Mussolini politics of Ezra Pound, a man of

integrity and a man of genius. It is quite another for a self-respecting

socialist to tolerate a fanatical racist reactionary who, in later

years, sympathised with Hitler and the white supremacists of South

Africa''.

Far from Grieve/MacDiarmid having a ''flirtation'' or ''a brush'' with

Italian fascism, German Nazism or Russian communism, he enjoyed

sustained love affairs with all three of them. Though the love affair

with fascism seems to have ended in 1939, the love affair with Russian

totalitarianism survived from the mid-1920s until his death. Besides, it

is clear from the articles cited in Bold's biography of MacDiarmid that

he must have encountered the neglected and relatively unknown articles

in which Grieve/MacDiarmid expressed his support for anti-democratic

elitism and authoritarian fascism and communism.

It is quite well-known that Grieve wrote a Plea for a Scottish Fascism

and a Programme for a Scottish Fascism for the Scottish Nation in June

1923. What is not so well known is that he wrote an article in the

April, 1928, issue of the Pictish Review in which he looked forward to

''a peaceful diffusion of the cultural influence of fascismo''.

But in the exceptionally interesting article on The National Idea and

the Company It Keeps in the March, 1928 issue of the Pictish Review,

MacDiarmid endorsed the fascism of Wyndham Lewis. Supporting Lewis's

denunciation of the alleged Bolshevism of D. H. Lawrence, he identified

the Jews' international finance as the main enemy in modern societies.

Utterly unaware of Lawrence's own racism the Scottish poet criticised

Lawrence for praising the supported virtues of the primitive ''mindless

Mexican Indians'' at the expense of ''the mere White fishermen'' of the

Outer Hebrides.

There is also an article by Grieve in the Modern Scot in 1932 on The

Caledonian Antiszygy and the Gaelic Idea in which he expressed support

for Hitler and the SS. The Nazis' chief virtue was that they preferred

''race-consciousnes'' to ''class-consciousness''. Moreover, in his

article in the July 23, 1932 issue of the Free Man in which he reviewed

John Galsworth's study of the works of Wyndham Lewis titled Apes, Japes,

and Hitlerism, MacDiarmid complains that Lewis's book on Hitler had been

ignored by the press. As he summed up: ''It was ignored, blank

disinterest shown; solely and simply because the newspapers in their

discounting of Hitlerian events were wilfully misrepresenting the

objects and intentions of the Hitlerian movement. Little is heard of

here of the anti-capital, anti-semitic activities the Nazis are engaged

upon; certainly no newspaper would give undue attention to Lewis's

account of them. A general prejudice eliminated any attention that might

have been paid. Hitler was doomed from the day of publication.''

When he contributed his article Bringing in the Jews to the Free Man,

May 20, 1933, under the pseudonym R. M. B., Grieve/MacDiarmid denounced

''the extraordinary proposal'' of Dr Sals Daiches, the father of

Professor David Daiches, to ''allow exiled Jews from Germany'' to settle

in the Scottish Highlands. Repeating some of the arguments that he had

made in a Plea for Scottish Fascism in 1923, he again insisted that the

Highlands should be reserved for ''ex-service Highlanders'' rather than

Jews from Germany. He was always true to the narrow nationalist

philosophy of ''our ain fish guts for our ain sea maws''.

Moreover, in the article that he contributed to the Free Man, March

10, 1934, on the formation of the British Union of Fascists under the

leadership of the former Labour Member of Parliament, Oswald Mosley,

MacDiarmid wrote nothing that was inconsistent with his utterances on

Fascism from 1922. Far from distancing himself from the Englishman's

fascist views, he welcomed them in so far as they did not interfere with

Scottish interests. In summing up his main point, he said: ''Either you

must take Britain as your political and economic unit or you must have

English fascism and Scottish fascism.'' An emotional identification with

dictators -- Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin -- did not inhibit Grieve/

MacDiarmid from agitating for Scottish national independence as the most

constant factor in his political thinking.

At the very heart of MacDiarmid's support for fascism and communism

was his constant and abiding racism. A constant theme in his journalism

and poetry, it brought him into conflict with the Communist Party of

Great Britain. When he engaged in a controversy in the Shetland News in

July 1939, he created antagonism towards himself by his references to

''the racial roots of real spiritual and cultural values''.

In July 1939, too, Grieve was attacked by Bob Cooney, an organiser of

the Communist Party of Great Britain in Aberdeen, for his ''egoism'' and

''racism''. Cooney accused him of a ''proto-fascist earth and blood

mysticism''. Furthermore, in an article in Life and Letters Today, Peter

Jamieson, the secretary of the Lerwick Unemployed Workers Movement,

criticised the Scottish poet thus: ''Some distinguished writers having

discovered Shetland, put forward theories of Norm autonomy . . . These

pretty theories woven in ivory towers in the seclusion of peaceful

islands are escapist fantasies of people who have found the pace of the

struggle of real national liberation too hot for them . . . They have

fled from the scene to dream mystic dreams helpful only to the Nazis,

and the creeping death they bring.''

Writing in a synthetic Scots inaccessible to many Scots,

Grieve/MacDiarmid did not empathise with the Scottish workers. In A

Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle, he expressed his unshakable elitism:

''The core of ocht is only for the few, Scorned by the mony, than wi'ts

empty name''. In the 1930s he defended Stalinism thus:

The Cheka's horrors are in their degree;

And'll end suner! What maitters 't what we kill

To lessen that foulest murder that deprives

Maist men o' real lives.

Asking the question of whether MacDiarmid was a poet of the first

rank, Harvey Oxenhorn did not simply offer an affirmative answer. He

also claimed the Scot's superiority over Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and

Wallace Stevens. As he summed up: ''The intellectual preoccupation which

all these modern figures share are all balanced in MacDiarmid by a

greater comfort with, indeed affection for, the flesh, the challenges

and opportunities of day-to-day. Put simply, MacDiarmid more than any of

the others, seeks to ballast intellectual modernism with abiding

humanism.''

At the centre of his self-image, MacDiarmid believed that:

A Scottish poet must assume

The burden o' his people's doom

And dee to brak' their livin' toom.

But the Scottish poet who dismissed his own people -- ''They're noch

but zoologically men'' -- was no humanist.

Despite the claims of some literary scholars that MacDiarmid had a

Marxist awareness of ''the suffering of man'', he did not identify with

the common ruck of humankind. A hallmark of all the great socialists was

a heightened awareness of the tragedy of the exploitation of ordinary

people throughout history. As the Italian socialist philosopher, Antonio

Labriola, put it: ''History is like an inferno. It might be presented as

a sombre drama, entitled 'The tragedy of Labour'.'' Criticising working

people's low intellectual horizons all his life, MacDiarmid seldom

paused to consider their great accomplishments under appalling

difficulties.

The simultaneous approval of Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin was not

restricted to his journalism. In the 1930s he produced poems in which he

paid homage to Joseph Stalin. When he contributed his tribute to Lewis

Grassic Gibbon in Little Reviews Anthology, he justified the Communist

Party's expulsion of Gibbon in the 1930s on charges of Trotskyism. In

the spirit of the Henri Barbusse and Romain Rolland, he savaged Gibbon

for putting a higher value on people than culture. Explaining his own

stance, he said: ''As I have said in one of my poems, I on the other

hand would sacrifice a million people any day for one immortal lyric. I

am a scientific socialist: I have no use whatever for emotional

humanism.''

From the very beginning, Grieve/MacDiarmid was a self-confessed

anti-humanist. Far from being a modernist, he tried, in Trotsky's vivid

phrase, to ''Unearth the principle of race from a medieval graveyard''.

Justifying Stalinism when he rejoined the Communist Party of Great

Britain in 1956, he wrote: ''Even if the figures of the enemies of

communism were accurate, the killings, starvings, frame-ups, unjust

judgments and all the rest of it are a mere bagatelle to the damnable

consequences of the profit motive, what must be laid to the account of

the so-called 'free nations of the West'.''

A consistent racist from 1916 until his death in 1978, MacDiarmid

remained impervious to Julian Huxley's argument that ''To speak of

'kinship' or 'common blood' for the populations of our great complex

modern social systems is to talk mere nonsense''. To those who will

scream blue murder about the accusation of racism against out greatest

poet since Burns, the stark and saddening evidence is there in his first

volume of autobiography, Lucky Poet, where he writes of (racially)

''inferior'' Scots.

In the second volume of autobiography, The Company I've Kept (London,

1968), he attributed John Maclean, the Clydeside socialist's ''great

power'' to the ''unconscious depths'' of his ''racial origins''.

Besides, in the 1970s, he insisted that ''what we need in Scotland is

another Ulster''.

A man of multi talents, Grieve/MacDiarmid simply did not like working

people enough to become a really great poet. Kind and generous in his

encounters with individual working folk, he could not escape his

constant infatuation with ''great men'' as the decisive makers of

history. Despite his exaggerated bouts of heavy drinking, most of his

life was lived out in debilitating poverty and austerity. But far from

being a humanitarian or a socialist-humanist modernist, he expressed his

deepest attitudes towards humankind in his little-known poem, The

Brotherhood of Man.

Written in the 1950s before he attracted belated attention from the

establishment he hated, it summed up everything he stood for, including

his particular kind of socialism:

The brotherhood of man is no mere fable,

We are all brothers, just like Cain and Abel.

* A former Reader in History and now a Senior Fellow in the School of

Arts in the University of Stirling, Dr James D. Young is a Fellow of the

Royal Historical Society. The author of eight books, he is working on a

number of projects including books on the history of Socialist Martyrs

and Africa and the British Left.