Anyone who met Alastair Reid for the first time could probably have guessed he was a writer without being told.
In the 10 or so years that I knew him, before his death two weeks ago, I don't think I ever heard him utter an ugly sentence, or one that if written down would have disgraced his reputation as a profound and clear-eyed poet and essayist.
Like many of the great writers I have met, words seemed to come out of his mouth already polished and ordered. His was the slow, sing-song delivery of Galloway, tinged with an American twang, but while the name Scotland was stamped on his marrow as if he were a stick of rock, in many ways he was a changeling. Brought up in a house which few could have matched for its Protestant work ethic - his father was a Kirk minister, his mother a doctor - he somehow managed to subvert that tradition to his own ends, working a fraction of the hours God gave him, but to indelible effect. He worked hard enough to feed himself and his family, but not so hard he could not do the things that he loved beyond writing: travelling, talking, cooking, reading and thinking.
His were the pursuits one could enjoy without much money, which was just as well, give that for a poet and translator, wealth is usually a hypothetical word. By the time I first met him his tastes were simple. He would sit at our dinner table, if he was staying with us in Musselburgh, making a small bottle of beer last forever, and barely finishing a plate of food. He was one of the best conversationalists I've ever met, a man who not only could entertain and enthrall, but was fascinated by what other people had to say.
Once, when we visited him in Garlieston, where in his later years he would spend a few weeks each year, he and his partner (later wife) Leslie held a dinner to mark the occasion. His longtime friend, the publisher Stephanie Wolfe Murray, brought a huge leg of lamb, and stuck it in the oven. It was only when I noticed that the oven door wouldn't shut that she propped a log against it, to reduce the heat loss. For dessert Alastair had set aside a small carton of Haagen-Dazs ice cream, to feed 12 or more of us. As a vegetarian, I was beginning to feel anxious. Guests started to arrive, also feeling peckish, but it was not until the poet Tom Pow and his wife arrived, laden with bags from M&S, that we could relax.
Lack of food did not bother Alastair; he got more sustenance from friends and books than from the fridge. The last time my husband and I saw him, three weeks before his death, he was exceedingly ill. Even so, as he lay on the couch in a friend's house in Edinburgh, he talked about Javier Marias, a Spanish novelist we both admired, whose father he remembered well. Seeing him so frail made it a melancholy occasion. More cheerful is to remember the anecdotes his life was filled with. Leslie once spoke of the time they were in his home in the Dominican Republic, where he had a ginger farm. The grass overgrowing the path was crawling with tarantulas, but they moved slowly and posed little threat. One night, however, Leslie opened her eyes beneath their mosquito net to find a rat sitting on the pillow. She shook Alastair awake to warn him. "Don't be ridiculous," he said, turning over to go back to sleep. "Why would it want to do that?"
Since his death, stories have been flooding in. He once showed us his bundles of passports, which had passed through so many borders they looked like stamp albums. Few have ever had a better claim to be a citizen of the world in the literal as well as metaphorical sense. If it weren't for his absolute absence of religious guilt, he'd have made a perfect character for Graham Greene.
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