Essayist, poet, traveller and translator Alastair Reid has spent most of his life outwith scotland, yet he has never quite let go
By Alan Taylor

A COUPLE of years ago, at St Andrews' poetry festival, Alastair Reid announced he was going to read his poem Scotland for the last time, after which he took a match to the page and burned it gleefully. For many readers, Scotland - the poem if not the place - and Reid are synonymous. Its pay-off line, spoken by "the woman from the fish-shop" - "We'll pay for it, we'll pay for it!" - is as potent as Poe's "Nevermore" and as cute a calibration of the country's hang-ups as it's possible to conceive. Though Reid has been long estranged from Scotland, it has, throughout a writing career spanning more than half-a-century, remained his preoccupation, some might say obsession. Reid, who is 82, left after the second world war had shown him, as it did many others, that there were sunnier and cheerier climes elsewhere, places where one's optimism was not immediately doused by Presbyterian doom.

The Galloway-born gallivanter is one of the world's itinerants, his collection of passports the footprints of a life spent incessantly on the move. But if this suggests impatience or inattention or a terminal case of itchy feet, that is not the character Reid projects. He is no day-tripper or fly-by-night. Rather, he prefers to go where his fancy takes him, spending as long in a place as he needs to take its temperature and locate its G-spot.

Spain was where he first alighted. In the summer of 1953, he recalls, he was sitting in a terrace in Deya "with quiet in mind". It was then he met Robert Graves, the subject of one of several fine essays in this long overdue two-volume collection of his poetry, prose and translations. Reid's debt to Graves is considerable. "A good translator," Graves told him, "must have nerve." This, Reid's own translations of Neruda, Borges and other South and Latin American luminaries, have in spades.

Like Graves, Reid is ambidextrous, writing prose for The New Yorker, on whose staff he was for 50 years, to ensure there was a loaf on the table, while writing poems, of which there have been too few, when moved to do so. Graves, he says, often "bred show dogs in order to be able to afford a cat. The dogs were prose; the cat was poetry". This is the kind of advice money cannot buy. Reid remained part of Graves's extended family for a number of years until a woman, one of the latter's muses, came between them. Henceforth Reid was portrayed as an "arch-betrayer" and the two never spoke again.

Such is the way of things. By then, though, Reid was surely emerging from under Graves's lengthy shadow. The New Yorker was edited in that golden age of the essay by the deceptively monkish William Shawn, who would hold the presses to discuss the merits of a semi-colon over a comma. Shawn gave Reid a licence to travel and he accepted it as if it were a free bus pass. The fruits of this were encounters which led to friendships in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and Peru with the above-mentioned Neruda and Borges as well as Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Guillermo Cabrera Infante.

Reid's attitude to travel is summed up in his pointillist essay Notes On Being A Foreigner. He was not an exile, an expatriate or a tourist, there being an ocean of difference between the three. "Tourists", he wrote, "are to foreigners as occasional tipplers are to alcoholics - they take strangeness and alienation in small, exciting doses, and besides, they are well fortified against loneliness." The kind of places Reid visited were off the tourist track. Latterly, his bible became The South American Handbook, among whose laconic advice was the instruction, if bitten, to catch "within limits" the venomous creature for the purpose of identification.

In such pieces Reid epitomised The New Yorker's unfazed sensibility and unrufflable sophistication. Read in tandem with the essays specifically concerning Scotland they act as an exotic counterweight to the bleakness of the country he abandoned. What is surprising, however, is Reid's youthful antagonism towards his native heath. His childhood, for instance, amidst the verdant tussocks of the south-west, appears to have verged on the idyllic. His father was a minister, but not, it seems, of the hellfire variety, while his mother was a doctor. But as personalities, his parents were like chalk and cheese. "They were, for us children," he writes, "like the North and South Poles. Heaven knows what strange equilibrium they achieved ..."

Perhaps, like his friend Muriel Spark, Reid felt that he had to leave to see the wider picture, to put himself and Scotland in perspective, to grow without the hindrance of personal and historical baggage. Perhaps he felt it had wrung him dry and vice versa. Perhaps he just wanted to feel the sun on his back without suffering the constant anxiety of rain. Where Reid was concerned, pleasures, joys, gifts and happiness, were to be accepted and enjoyed, guilt-free. In the Scotland in which he grew up that was rarely a possibility. In the 1950s, every silver lining was cloaked in the darkest of clouds.

If confirmation were needed that he must escape, he got it when he came home after the war to complete his degree at St Andrews. For all his ambivalence towards it, the home of golf has continued to haunt and fascinate Reid. "St Andrews", he wrote in Digging Up Scotland, a model of the essayist's art, "embodied the Scotland I chose to leave behind. The spirit of Calvin, far from dead, stalked the countryside, ever present in a pinched wariness, a wringing of hands." Among those he later introduced to it was the blind Borges, who could smell it if he couldn't see it. That is not the act of someone who is eager to deny his roots. Maybe what he was seeking was what Neruda told him about his fellow Chileans, who had learned to forgive themselves absolutely everything. Thus was bestowed on Reid "cultural absolution".

It is the acceptance and understanding of this that makes what Reid has to say in his various works so special and important. In their introductions to these two gilded volumes, which have been edited by Marc Lambert, Andrew O'Hagan, who addresses the prose, and Douglas Dunn, the poetry, pay proper tribute to Reid's parallel careers.

"How elegantly he has brought us through the centres of nowhere in search of somewhere", writes O'Hagan. "For much of the time", observes Dunn, "Reid is a poet of specific places rather than his nationality, a choice, or identity, which he shares with Norman MacCaig."

With neither of whom one would quibble. But the last word for now should go to Alastair Reid who, in the overture to Outside In, reflects on the way he feels about Scotland today and its constitutional future. Scots, he suggests, "have shed in large part their ancestral glooms and their defeatism, if not their contentiousness, and will do very well at taking charge of their own affairs". When it comes to taking charge of one's own affairs, no-one has managed it better than him.

Inside Out And Outside In, Alastair Reid's selected prose, poetry and translations, are published in two volumes by Polygon at £14.99 each. He appears at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Monday, August, 25 at 8.30pm