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Postscript to 'The Poet and the Party'
MacDiarmid commented on his second expulsion from the Communist Party in a long letter to Barbara Niven, 31 March 1939, which has recently been acquired by the National Library of Scotland. [1] He acknowledged that one of the conditions upon which he had been reinstated in 1937 was that he 'would not publish political controversial matter without first submitting it and having it approved by the Scottish District Committee.' He continued, 'With regard to The Voice of Scotland when I started this I pointed out to the Party that it was not and could not be a Communist organ and that my relation to it would be precisely that of a journalist or comrade who was on the staff of a capitalist paper. All I could promise to do was to use my influence wherever possible in a pro-Communist direction in what I wrote myself or in my selection of other people's contributions.' However, it is quite clear that the above was a disingenuous self-justification on MacDiarmid's part and that there had been no consultation with the Party before the commencement of The Voice of Scotland. [2] So far from using his influence 'wherever possible in a pro-Communist direction', his 'Notes of the Quarter' in the first issue made it clear that 'our principal aim is advocacy of independent Scottish Workers' Republicanism' à la John MacLean' which was not the aim of the party of which he wished to remain a member. [3]
MacDiarmid also wrote in the letter to Barbara Niven: 'The second condition was that I should form a Scottish Section of the Writers' International. I was ready and willing to do this but as the correspondence shows the Party itself instructed me to hold my hand pending further communication which despite repeated letters from me I never received.' There is no evidence that the formation of a Scottish Section was a condition of re-admission. However, Peter Kerrigan's letters of 24 June and 5 July 1937 show that the formation of a Scottish Section was under discussion. [4] In fact, both MacDiarmid and the Scottish District Committee should have known that the Writers' International had been dissolved on 19 December 1935 and had been replaced by the International Association of Writers for the Defence of Culture. [5] In Left Review the attribution 'Published by T H Wintringham for the Writers' International, British Section' was dropped after November 1935 and became 'Published by T H Wintringham' in February 1936. (I should have noted this earlier.)
In the same letter MacDiarmid exculpated himself from his failure to meet the Secretariat by putting the blame on James Barke (1905-58), who was antagonistic towards MacDiarmid in the thirties. [6] 'The District Committee summoned me to meet them to discuss the matter when I was in Glasgow in December. I intended to do so, but as the result of an assault upon me in the Glasgow Press Club by James Barke, the novelist, whom I understood to be a member of the CP and a personal friend of some of the District Committee and of my particular enemies in or near to the Party, I finally decided not to do so, and didn't.' Whether the assault was physical or verbal is not known. MacDiarmid had obviously written in similar terms on 6 February 1939 to Peter Kerrigan who replied on 9 February, 'James Barke is not and never has been a member of the Communist Party.' [7] Barke, however, was certainly a fellow-traveller at this time.
In their letter of expulsion of 23 February 1939 for 'failure to comply with the conditions of [his] re-instatement', the Central Control Commission noted to MacDiarmid: 'The completely arrogant and undisciplined tone of [his] postscript to [his] letter of 6 February 1939'. [8]
In a chapter excluded from his autobiography Lucky Poet (1943) MacDiarmid appears to refer to James Barke's 'assault'. The chapter 'My Reply to Roy Campbell' was clearly written after the publication of Campbell's Flowering Rifle on 6 February 1939. Here MacDiarmid makes a comparison between the murder of Lorca and the 'assault' upon himself. 'I am aware of course, that there is no doubt as to who murdered Lorca and that there is nothing to choose in this respect between Fascists and the great body of so-called Communists. Even I in Scotland have been subjected to unprovoked physical assault at the hands of Left Wing supporters — unprovoked except for the provocation automatically given to these creatures by my intellectual and spiritual superiority.' [9] Perhaps he had written to Peter Kerrigan in similar vein.
Earlier in the same chapter MacDiarmid was able to give support both to the International Brigade and to Catalan anarchism in successive pages. He wrote:
'I would have given anything I had to give to have been a member of the International Brigade in Spain, but my domestic responsibilities, my physical condition (incompletely recovered from my very serious illness in 1935) made this impossible.' [10]
Then he went on to make a deadly criticism of a workers' government:
'I had for many reasons a deeper idea than most of the other writers on the Spanish War have succeeded in giving of the springs of Catalan Anarchism. I knew that to these Anarchists theirs was the last outpost of liberty in Europe; liberty, to them, was something tangible, something that included practical comradeship. They had fared no better under the republic than under the monarchy since machine-gun bullets remained in the one case what they had been in the other, and it was plain to them that every government, even a government of the workers, is ruled by hatred and fear of the workers.' [11]
While striving to maintain his membership in the CPGB MacDiarmid adhered to beliefs in an independent 'Scottish Workers' Republic', in 'social credit' and in anarchism which were incompatible with membership. In a footnote in Lucky Poet he tried to justify his contradictions as 'interdependencies'. 'As a Socialist, of course, I am, it should be obvious, interested only in a very subordinate way in the politics of Socialism as a political theory; my real concern with Socialism is as an artist's organized approach to the interdependencies of life.' [12] Here he was responding to Eric Linklater's characterisation of him as Hugh Skene in Magnus Merriman (1934); 'Whether the revolution he advocated was Communist or Nationalist he was not very clear'. [13] In 1962 MacDiarmid quoted the footnote in full in a letter to Barbara Niven in which he claimed to be 'completely covered' by it against criticisms which David Craig had made of his Marxism in 'MacDiarmid the Marxist Poet'. [14]
As a poet MacDiarmid justified his inconsistencies by reference to John Keats' definition of 'negative capability' in 1817. Keats wrote:
'I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason'. [15]
In a MS verse MacDiarmid wrote:
… In 'The Glass of Pure Water' which was written by September 1937 MacDiarmid called for 'the ending of all Government/Since all Government is a monopoly of violence'. [17] In a passage written in 1938 and first published in 'The Kind of Poetry I Want' chapter in Lucky Poet MacDiarmid wrote 'But I have found in Marxism all that I need'. [18] Therein lies one of the contradictions.
In a letter to Guy Aldred on 28 August 1939 MacDiarmid claimed that he had been 'expelled in ludicrous lying pretexts as, indeed, anyone with a scintilla of genuine socialist integrity is always sure to be.' [19] The party's grounds for expulsion were given as 'political irresponsibility and failure to conform to the discipline of the Party' [20] in 1936, and his failure 'not only to submit controversial material to the DPC before publication, but also to keep the appointment with the Scottish DPC which had been asked for in [his] letter of 7.11.38' [21] in 1939. In general the party showed a good deal of patience and restraint in correspondence with MacDiarmid and, on one occasion, the London Secretariat suggested that if he felt he couldn't accept party discipline it would be better for them to part and co-operate on questions where they were in agreement. [22] It should be added that years of literary neglect, poverty and isolation (and one serious illness) in the Shetland Islands from 1933 onwards had led, at least in part, to the extreme ways in which he advanced his views.
Manuscripts are quoted by permission of the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.
I am full of Keats's negative capability
…
The power of holding in my mind all manner of doubts and contradictions
With no impatience to find solutions to me,
To find a key, a panacea, an open sesame, a single
Solution to all problems, or to follow
One single philosophic or religious line,
Accepting it as the right and only one for me. [16]
John Manson
