The death of Hugh MacDiarmid, 1978

Alan Bold

When Hugh MacDiarmid died the country lost a champion of the Scots language and nationalism who challenged writers to wake up, take courage and be heard. A poet and political grenade, his immoderate views ignited a renaissance in the literary community. Alan Bold, a prolific man of letters, was MacDiarmid’s friend and biographer

Christopher Murray Grieve was 86 when he died in Chalmers Hospital, Edinburgh, on September 9, 1978. He had outlived not only his mentors but most of his colleagues and contemporaries. Though he advanced the ideal of being “selfuniversal”, MacDiarmid was aware of his identity as a witness to a particular period.

He had no desire to live on into another era as an invalid. As news of his death was announced, the name Grieve was mentioned only by way of explaining this was the actual identity of Scotland’s greatest modern poet who was internationally known by the pseudonym he adopted in 1922: Hugh MacDiarmid. I remember sitting at home and listening to the lunchtime news.

Shortly after the announcement there was a knock on my door. The actor Henry Stamper, my near neighbour, had also heard. “Chris,” said Henry, “was a great man. Now we’ll see how he is remembered.”

On Wednesday, September 13, my wife and I were driven to Langholm for the funeral by our close friend Trevor Royle, then Literature Director of the Scottish Arts Council. It was a dreich day and umbrellas were out to protect heads against the drizzle. There were distinguished heads at the gathering of several hundred admirers.

Most of them were bowed down, grieving for MacDiarmid. As the mist settled on the hillside of Langholm Cemetery tears were shed by the graveside. Alex Clark, MacDiarmid’s election agent in his campaign against

Sir Alec Douglas Home, spoke about MacDiarmid’s political commitment: “He wanted to see Socialism here in Scotland and believed that, given full recognition of Nationhood, Scotland would lead Britain to Socialist change.”

Norman MacCaig, poet and one of the closest friends during MacDiarmid’s final years, delivered a more subjective statement. “He would,” said MacCaig, “walk into my mind as if it were a town and he a torchlight procession of one, lighting up the streets of my mind and some of the nasty little things that were burrowing into the corners.”

MacCaig described MacDiarmid as “a gregarious, genuinely friendly, and most courteous man, who savaged hypocrisy and fought for the enlargement of life”.

Valda Grieve, the poet’s widow, placed white roses on the coffin. Christopher Murray Grieve was thus laid to rest in his native Langholm. The restless spirit of Hugh MacDiarmid could not be similarly confined.

Mourners gathered for a drink in Langholm. Valda expressed her opinion that it was appropriate her husband be buried in the Muckle Toon so “those who rejected him will now have to live with him”. Many of us got drunk and there were discussions that turned into fierce arguments. Norman MacCaig had anticipated, in his poem After His Death, that MacDiarmid’s death would be observed by two minutes’ pandemonium. Doubtless MacDiarmid would have liked it that way.