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Hugh MacDiarmid: the Poet and the Party
Hugh MacDiarmid joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in London in the summer of 1934. [1] In the previous spring he had failed to be reinstated in the National Party of Scotland of which he had been a founder member in 1928. [2] Yet at the time MacDiarmid joined the CPGB, he was finding his way towards John MacLean's position, of an independent Scottish Workers Republic. His poem, 'John MacLean (1879-1923)', was first published in The Free Man on 23 September 1933. He visited Grassic Gibbon in Welwyn Garden City in the spring of 1934 and reported that 'Towards the end ... [Gibbon] ... became more and more a Scottish Communist-Nationalist à la John MacLean', [3] ie, he ascribed his own position to Gibbon since Gibbon never referred to MacLean. By the time MacDiarmid came to write 'Red Scotland' which was finished in April 1935, he was in full agreement with MacLean's position, and quoted MacLean's pamphlets, 'The coming war with America' (Winter 1919) and 'The Irish Tragedy: Scotland's Disgrace' (June 1920).
MacDiarmid also wrote out for the first time the quotation from Lenin's speech in November 1922 at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International which he included twice in Lucky Poet and which became one of his favourite quotations:
It would be a very serious mistake to suppose that one can become a Communist without making one's own the treasures of human knowledge. It would be mistaken to imagine that it is enough to adopt the Communist formulas and conclusions of Communist science without mastering the sum-total of different branches of knowledge, the final outcome of which is Communism. ... Communism becomes an empty phrase, a mere facade, and the Communist a mere bluffer; if he has not worked over in his consciousness the whole inheritance of human knowledge — made his own, and worked over anew, all that was of value in the more than two thousand years of development of human thought. [4]
In parentheses MacDiarmid added: 'My Scottish Communist comrades must forgive me if I am quite unable to recognise any of them in this description of what really constitutes a Communist.' [5] His comrades were soon to become aware of this opinion. The first portion of 'Red Scotland' to appear in print formed part of a three-column letter, headlined 'Scotland, France & Working Class Interests', on the front page of the third issue of New Scotland, 26 October 1935. [6] The 'interests' given here form a heady mixture of a Scottish 'proletarian and Republican' secession from the Empire, and a revival of the Auld Alliance in the belief that 'the alignments in the coming war will ... probably be England, Germany, Italy, and Japan against France and America.' It should be borne in mind that, though much less radical than MacDiarmid's 'proletarian and Republican' position, the 1937 SNP Conference passed a resolution 'that the Scottish National Party is strongly opposed to the man power of Scotland being used to defend an Empire in the governing of which she has no voice.' In the summer of 1939, too, MacDiarmid still believed that a time must come when the Scottish workers would be 'actuated by a desire not to be used as cannon fodder in the coming war with America for which English Imperialism is planning.' [7]
The letter in New Scotland brought MacDiarmid into public conflict with one of the Scottish communist comrades he had implicitly slighted in 'Red Scotland', Peter Kerrigan, a near contemporary, then Secretary of the Scottish District Committee and member of the Executive Committee of the CPGB. [8] John Lochore, a veteran of the 1936 Hunger March and also of the International Brigade, has recalled that 'Kerrigan was a very, very hard man. He was very, very firm and very Party-lineish — no deviation and so forth. But as far as honesty and integrity went he was the model for that.' [9] In his reply in the Daily Worker, 25 November 1935, reprinted in New Scotland on 30 November, Kerrigan stated that 'If in spite of the joint efforts of the British workers such imperialist war took place, our task in Scotland would be, together with the rest of the British workers, to struggle for the proletarian revolution'. He also called on MacDiarmid to dissociate from the economic theories of Major C H Douglas which MacDiarmid regarded as 'the alternative to Fascism and the complement and corrective of Communism', [10] and which he continued to believe in throughout his life.
The main thrust of MacDiarmid's second letter of 14 December was that vis-a-vis Kerrigan he was in by far the superior intellectual position. He situated himself as belonging to 'the revolutionary section of Scottish Nationalists' and claimed that his views were in accord with the views of the leading marxist thinkers on the national question. 'What are Communists doing in Scotland at all if not working to achieve a Communist Scotland?'
In the concluding letter on 1 February 1936 Kerrigan considered that 'Scotland is not a non-sovereign nation, and therefore we cannot put forward the demand for political secession.' It was incomprehensible to him that MacDiarmid, who had slighted Georgi Dimitrov's status as a thinker, should be 'in the position to proclaim his membership of the Communist Party.'
1936 — Criticism and Correspondence
On 10 June 1936 the Scottish District Secretariat wrote the first of more than twenty letters to Hugh MacDiarmid over the next three years with regard to his membership and his views. He preserved and bequeathed these to the National Library of Scotland in a special collection relating to his political and other activities from 1929 to 1978. [11] 'We have raised with our Party Centre certain questions regarding yourself which involved also your membership of the Party. The Centre has instructed us to get in touch with you personally in order to take these matters up and then report to them.' [12] The Secretariat requested a meeting either in Glasgow or with its representatives in Edinburgh.
From the evidence of the Secretariat's next letter, MacDiarmid replied that he would be 'down soon' in Edinburgh, and thus a pattern was established which would last until February 1939 since MacDiarmid never met the Secretariat even when he was in Glasgow for the dinner in honour of William Power on 3 December 1938 and a meeting had been arranged for 6 or 7 December. Of over a dozen letters which MacDiarmid wrote to the party justifying his position, and which are known about from the evidence of the party's replies, nothing has so far been traced.
The first explicit criticism made by the Secretariat arose from MacDiarmid's open letter to O H Whyte, 1 July 1936, which was prepared like a press handout with the headline 'PROLETARIAN - SEPARATIST LITERARY LINE IN SCOTLAND'. In the third issue of the monthly Outlook, June 1936, James Whyte, the literary editor, had published the first chapter of Edwin Muir's Scott and Scotland in which Muir stressed that Scots was no longer a homogeneous language. Whyte had declined to publish MacDiarmid's letter in reply. On this occasion the Secretariat avoided comment on Muir because they were 'not fully conversant with the controversy between you, Muir and Whyte' .They took issue with MacDiarmid over his proposals to run as a candidate in the Edinburgh University Rectorial Election in November on a 'Communist proletarian separatist-Republican line' and to organise an 'Inter-University United Front — Socialists, Communists, and Scottish Nationalists — Conference' without consultation with them as a party member. [13] The Secretariat also received a copy of MacDiarmid's four-page pamphlet, Scotland; and the Question of a Popular Front Against Fascism and War which was published by the Hugh MacDiarmid Book Club during the Rectorial campaign. In the pamphlet, MacDiarmid asked:
Are the young men of Scotland once again to be sacrificed wholesale in another great Imperialist War? There would be no danger of anything of the sort if Scotland were once again an independent nation, as it ought to be. The last War was Ireland's opportunity; the next must be Scotland's. There is widespread discussion to-day of the need for a Popular Front in Britain. What is needed, however, is not a British National People's Front but an International People's Front in the British Isles; a very different matter; and a movement that would signalise a deathblow at the heart of the British Empire. [14]
Later in the pamphlet MacDiarmid defined this International People's Front as a Front 'of the workers of Scotland, England, Wales, and Cornwall.' [15]
The sentences which the Secretariat took exception to were quoted back to MacDiarmid. 'The betrayal of John MacLean's line by the Communist Party of Great Britain has resulted in a loss to Scottish Socialism beyond all reckoning. Even William Gallacher, MP, who was primarily responsible for it, admits this in his autobiography, Revolt on the Clyde.' [16] Consequently MacDiarmid was expelled by the unanimous decision of the Scottish District Committee and informed by letter on 30 November.
In November, too, the Scottish issue of Left Review appeared with contributions by Edwin and Willa Muir, James Whyte, William Soutar, Catherine Carswell, Neil Gunn, James Barke and Edward Scouller, a friend of Edwin Muir, but not by MacDiarmid, who had earlier contributed a poem and a letter to the magazine. In a letter to MacDiarmid, Francis George Scott reported that the issue had been 'engineered' by Douglas Boddie, manager of Collet's Bookshop in the High Street, Glasgow, Mary Litchfield and James Whyte. [17] Boddie had claimed to Scott that he had written to MacDiarmid for a contribution but had received no reply. Left Review was published by the British Section of the Writers' International.
1937 — Appealing Against Expulsion
On 8 March 1937 MacDiarmid appealed against his expulsion from the party. The reply from the party centre in London on 7 April was conciliatory, although it appeared to conflate the correspondence in New Scotland with the exception taken to Scotland; and the Question of a Popular Front against Fascism and War, without giving an accurate account of either. 'As far as we are aware, the question of the differences between yourself and the DPC (District Party Committee) arose out of an article which you wrote in a Scots Nationalist paper on the question of the Popular Front. This article in the opinion of our Scots District Committee and in our opinion was rather anti-English people as well as anti-British imperialism.' [18]
MacDiarmid was re-admitted to the party by the Appeals Commission during the congress in May. In return for re-admission he was asked for an undertaking to 'submit the manuscript of any book dealing with Party political policy to the Party Secretariat for consideration.' [19] Clearly he gave this undertaking as the issue was raised with him on 24 June 1938 when he started The Voice of Scotland in that month without consultation.
The party correspondence for the rest of 1937 dealt with MacDiarmid's idea for a Scottish Section of the Writers' International and with the party's wish to draw on MacDiarmid's 'undoubtedly wide experience' of the Scottish national question.
The main difficulty in establishing a Writers' Group was seen by the party as MacDiarmid's dispute with the Muirs whom the party hoped to recruit as members. In a letter of 5 July Peter Kerrigan referred to them as 'Comrades' who were 'very close to the Party and sympathetic but not actually members'. [20]
At an afternoon meeting in Arthur Geddes' house in Edinburgh in June, Edwin Muir had delivered a paper on the future of Scottish literature. It was attended, among others, by the Edinburgh communists Fred Douglas and Brian Campbell, who were two of the five editors of Eleventh Hour Questions, (Edinburgh, 1937), and by the Nationalist George Elder Davie, a postgraduate student, who had been convener of MacDiarmid's Rectorial campaign the previous year. Davie clearly made a report of the meeting to MacDiarmid and this report formed the basis of his 'A Typical Little Scottish Politico-Cultural Afternoon' which he published ten years later in The Voice of Scotland. Donald Gordon attended the meeting with Davie.
MacDiarmid expressed concern about the content of Muir's paper and about the attitude of Douglas and Campbell towards him. The party asked Douglas and Campbell for their observations and both replies are extant. [21] They denied that there had been any attack on MacDiarmid's work as a poet by Muir or anyone else. Campbell pointed out that he had been in dispute with Davie over MacDiarmid's claim to be a communist and a 'social crediter' and reported Davie's contention that it was 'dialectical' with the wry comment, 'Since then I understand that he was not joking.' Campbell also reported that the Muirs had 'co-operated in Left Book Club work in St Andrews, and (Mrs Muir especially) in work for Spain.' He thought there was 'still a possibility that they may be brought over completely to the Party, and in any case, if tactfully treated, their future collaboration is assured.' He mentioned a Comrade Trist of Dundee, 'who has been in close touch with the Muirs and other Scottish writers'. [22] In a letter of 19 January 1938, Fred Douglas also refers to 'Montgomery of Dundee'.[23]
Muir's Letters confirm that in the mid-thirties he was considering the communist position. On 4 May 1935 he wrote to Stephen Spender, '1 have been coming more and more towards a socialist or communist view of things for some time'. [24] However, in another letter to Spender, on 6 October 1937, less than three months after Campbell's report, he wrote, 'I meet many communists here, chiefly Dundee ones, for Dundee is only half an hour away, and I like and respect them; but I feel I shall never join the Party, indeed I could not. [25]
In the letter of 5 July the Scottish District Committee accepted that there was 'undoubtedly a very strong sense of Scottish nationhood existent among the people' to which the party had given inadequate consideration. It also noted the existence of separate Scottish institutions and called for the establishment of 'some form of self- government' but considered that 'the raising of the issue of a Scottish Parliament and separation from England is wrong'. Aitken Ferguson's Scotland pamphlet (1938) advocated 'a central administrative body for Scotland' which 'should have the administration of all Scottish affairs delegated to it by Parliament.' [26] In 1938, also, the Party organised 'A Pageant of Scottish History' which was shown in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen. Hugh MacDiarmid's name was missing from the 'Cultural' section of the printed programme.
1938-39 — The Voice of Scotland
In June 1938 the first issue of The Voice of Scotland appeared. So far from submitting his political manuscripts to the party prior to publication, MacDiarmid made it clear that the contents were 'not subject to Communist Party discipline.' [27] 'The general editorial standpoint,' he wrote, 'is that laid down in "The Red Scotland Manifesto" in this issue, and our principal aim is advocacy of Independent Scottish Workers' Republicanism à la John MacLean.' [28] On 30 June the issue was the subject of a two-page letter from Aitken Ferguson which succinctly expressed the Scottish District Committee's viewpoints:
If the Party in the rest of Scotland is driving at one set of issues and C M Grieve is using his literary talents and reputation on another set of issues then, you know 'a house divided against itself' — nay, more, people will wonder what is the real voice and enemies may attempt to play one off against the other. As to your 'converting the Party' — sure; there are avenues inside our own ranks, letters and statements to the District and there is, of course, the Discussion on the Party Congress now opening in the 'Daily [Worker]'. It doesn't need to advocate militant Godlessness, which can only serve to close the ears of many people who would otherwise be disposed to listen... It does not need to alienate by advocacy (premature) of republicanism many monarchists who would be willing to struggle for Home Rule for Scotland. [29]
In fact, there were only 80 subscribers to the first volume of The Voice of Scotland and 31 to the second, but MacDiarmid would have argued, with justification, that it all depended on who the 80 or 31 were. [30]
In the second issue, MacDiarmid made public comment on this inner-party matter, paraphrasing one of Ferguson's sentences, and describing the inner-party statement on Scottish Nationalism as 'utterly inept'. [31] Barbara Niven's famous cartoon of the Muirs appeared in the second issue, and on 1 November Aitken Ferguson commented drily, 'I rather think that better targets could be found for the wit of the revolutionaries than people like the Muirs who, if they are not exactly with us at least are not hostile and render help in some small ways.' [32]
Inside the front cover of the third issue, under the headline, 'Spain and the Celtic Volunteers', MacDiarmid wrote:
One of the most interesting facts in relation to the Spanish struggle is that the Celtic members — Scottish, Irish, and Welsh — of the International Brigade found it impossible to work hand in hand with their English comrades and had to break away from them and join up in a body with the Americans instead. [33]
Peter Kerrigan, who had been in Spain, received this issue on 25 January 1939, and wrote to MacDiarmid on the same day:
I also want to object in the strongest possible fashion to the complete travesty of facts regarding the British Battalion of the International Brigade which is printed in the inside page of the cover. ... I say this because I know, personally, the statement to be untrue and obviously based on wrong information in relation to some of our Irish comrades in the Brigade. [34]
Donald Renton's recollections, which were recorded by Professor Victor Kiernan, appear to amplify Kerrigan's objection:
There had been brought into being an Irish Company. In the light of the struggle of the Irish people for their own national independence this Company should have been, in my view, quite a separate organisation. even though attached to the British Battalion and part of the International Brigade. In practice, however, the Irish national struggle as a related factor to the Spanish fight was not in my opinion concretely enough recognised. So it brought about one or two ugly situations at Madrigueras during the training period. [35]
In 1998 William Herrick, a member of the Lincoln Battalion in Spain, seemed to confirm that an Irish company (only) had joined the Americans and not for the reason MacDiarmid had given. Herrick wrote: 'A new group arrived one day, this one not from the States but from the British Battalion training camp — An Irish company. Though so far as we knew no bullets had been fired, the Irish troubles had broken out among the British, and the Irish company was transferred to us.' [36]
On 23 February 1939 the Central Control Commission informed MacDiarmid that the request of the Scottish District Committee for his expulsion had been upheld. [37] On this occasion he did not appeal.
On 20 February 1957 he was informed by Gordon McLennan, then Scottish Secretary, that the Scottish Committee of the Party had decided unanimously to support his re-admission. [38] He remained a member until his death.
In the course of an obituary in the final, but unpublished, edition of The Voice of Scotland in 1959, MacDiarmid wrote: 'As we go to press, news comes of another great loss through the death at 71 of Dr Edwin Muir. Our deepest sympathy goes out to the families and friends of all these fine men.' The 'fine men' were Dr Alan Orr Anderson, James Barke, Dr Henry W. Meikle, Prof. Denis Saurat, Dr Francis George Scott, Prof. N. Kemp Smith, Dr Harry Wilshir — and Dr Edwin Muir. [39]
An earlier version of this article was published in the Scottish literary journal Cencrastus.
The research for this essay has been done entirely from primary sources. MSS are quoted by permission of the National Library of Scotland and of Edinburgh University Library.
John Manson
