The Poems of Norman MacCaig

Contents

Title Page

Editorial Note and Ewen McCaig

Acknowledgements

Norman MacCaig: an Introduction Alan Taylor

Quotations from MacCaig

Previously uncollected poems are denoted by an asterisk.

1947

The last week of the year

So many make one

Public bar

Instrument and agent

1948

Ophelia

Not yet afterwards

False summer

I remember you

Early summer

Sun blink

Private diary

No time, no time

Falls of Measach

Environment

The year, only, goes by

In December

1949

Charlatan summer

End of a cold night

Morning

Encounter

Wild and drunken night

Misty morning and no time

Cold wind in May

Lies for comfort

After

Separate

Same day

Always tonight

November night, Edinburgh

Be easy

Something still

1950

Drifter

Night no more real

Country house

Back to Sutherland after a long absence

Out from a lecture

Edinburgh spring

Empty pool

High Street, Edinburgh

You went away

21 October

Double life

Wreck

1951

Old life for new

The rosyfingered

No escape

Hero

Frost and thin fog

1952

Wet snow

Swimming lizard

Socrates

Hugh MacDiarmid’s lyrics

1953

Summer farm

Sheep-dipping

Birds all singing

Shadow in summer

Boats

Still two

Brother

Botanic gardens

1954

Accuser

Party

By comparison

Information

Dream world

Quoting day

Laggandoan, Harris

Maiden Loch

Climbing Suilven

Contraries

Fiat

Harpsichord playing Bach

Dying landscape

Too bright a day

Sad cunning

Poem for a goodbye

Spate in winter midnight

Golden calf

Fetish

Ego

Non pareil

Pioneer

Growing down

1955

Celtic twilight

Sacred river

Ballade of good whisky

Gifts

In no time at all

Roses and thorns

Particular you

Stone pillow

Clachtoll

1956

Spectroscope

Another flood

Insurrection of memory

Moor burns

Inverkirkaig Bay

Feeding ducks

Fishing the Balvaig

A man and a boat

Regatta, Plockton

Goat

Nude in a fountain

Country bedroom

Haycock, Achiltibuie

1957

Turned head

Creator

Too cold for words

Jug

Any Orpheus

Treeless landscape

Dude

1958

Explicit snow

By the canal, early March

Edinburgh courtyard in July

Half-built boat in a hayfield

Ardmore

Advices of time

Castles in Spain

Spring in a clear October

Standing in my ideas

Two ways of it

Celtic cross

World’s centre

From A Round Of Applause (mostly 1959–61)

Memory two ways

Sound of the sea on a still evening

Rain on fence wire

Translations of innocence

Failed mystic

Crocus

Spraying sheep

Lighthouse

Culag Pier

Always first morning

Other self

All being equal

Ordinary homecoming

In a level light

Midnight, Lochinver

Things in each other

The shore road

High up on Suilven

Preacher

Moorings

Christmas snow in Princes Street

Poachers, early morning

Byre

Still life

Water tap

Mutual life

Loch Sionascaig

Outsider

Dunvegan

Loch na Bearraig

John Quixote

Work in progress

Romantic sunset

Explorer

July evening

A good day

Old man by himself

Purification

Thaw on a building site

Dinghy skirting a reef

Ambiguous snow

Canal in winter

1959

Crofter’s kitchen, evening

Moon

Green water

Perfect morning

1960

Early Sunday morning, Edinburgh

Black cat in a morning

Granton

1961

Man at sea

*Hare

1962

Harris, East side

A voice of summer

No accident

Bull

Appearances

Signs and signals

Construction site

Fire water

Sandstone mountain

True ways of knowing

Same new start

Street preacher

Hugh MacDiarmid

Solitary crow

Sleet

Sheep dipping, Achmelvich

Old crofter

Likenesses

By Achmelvich bridge

A corner of the road, early morning

Skittles

Neglected graveyard, Luskentyre

Remembering old Murdo scything

Not only there

Icy road

Traffic stop

1963

Tired sympathy

Heron

Summer waterfall, Glendale

Aspects

Sleepy passenger on a wild road

Struck by lightning

By an overflowing stream

Firewood

Saturday morning

Winter

Drenched field and bright sun

Wind in the city

Among scholars

Miracles in working clothes

Coral island

Fetching cows

Falls pool, evening

Movements

Vestey’s well

Straggling geranium

1964

Threshing

Another pause

Inarticulate

A noise of stumbles

A writer

Stages

Hill streams of Abruzzi

Summer drowse

Three invisibles

Nothing so memorable

Two shepherds

Loch Roe

Assisi

Responsibility

An ordinary day

Porpoises

Smuggler

Flooded mind

Cold song

Leader of men

No nominalist

Absorbed

Progress

Waiting to notice

Go-between

In this wild day

Interruption to a journey

Walking home exhausted

The streets of Florence

Above Inverkirkaig

On a cloudy mountain

Escapist

Linguist

No consolation

Blind horse

Near midnight

Frogs

Looking down on Glen Canisp

1965

Old poet

Sounds of the day

*Trio

Four o’clock blackbird

Obituary

Illumination: on the track by Loch Fewin

Humanism

No choice

1966

A difference

Between

Foiled shepherd

Brooklyn cop

Circle Line

Tugboat poet

Writers’ conference, Long Island University

Hotel room, 12th floor

Leaving the Museum of Modern Art

*Last night in New York

*New England Theocritus

Estuary

Sleeping compartment

Painting – ‘The Blue Jar’

Power dive

Diplomat

Antique shop window

1967

Space travel

Now and for ever

Starlings

Learning

Orgy

Moment musical in Assynt

Rhu Mor

*Windy day in March

Milne’s Bar

Crossing the Border

Aunt Julia

Uncle Roderick

Country postman

The Red Well, Harris

Uncle Seumas

Fog at dusk

Balances

Truth for comfort

Small round loch

Names and their things

Intrusion

Old man thinking

Song without music

Old rose bush

Mirror

Names

Numismatist

Brechtian blues

Visitor

Basking shark

Walking to Inveruplan

So many summers

Whales

From A Man in my Position (mostly 1967–68)

Old myth, new model

The root of it

No wizard, no witch

Reclining Figure by Henry Moore: Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh

Descent from the Green Corrie

Dancing minister

An academic

A man in Assynt

1968

Drop scene

One of the many days

Millstones

*World within world

Boundaries

Structures

No end, no beginning

To a poet, grown old

In my mind

Give or take

Wild oats

Mrs Grant

Green stain

Night fishing on the Willow Pool

Things in their elements

Venus fly-trap

Cliff top, east coast

A man in my position

Gulls on a hill loch

The unlikely

Message taken

It’s hopeless

Tree hung with fairy lights

Concerto

Old Edinburgh

Spilled salt

Preening swan

Spring tide

Sure proof

Limits

Lord of Creation

Sparrow

Two focuses

I and my thoughts of you

July day spectacular

God in the grass

*One Easter Time

1969

Country dance

*Television studio

Below the Green Corrie

Portrait

Bookworm

Last word

Incident

The big tease

In a mist

Confused heretic

1970

Sunset ploughing

Among the talk and the laughter

Words in nowhere

Mirror talk

Flirt

Bluestocking

Aesthetics

Excuse

Midnights

*Battlefield near Inverness

Old maps and new

1971

Another incident

Centre of centres

Memorial

Between two nowheres

After his death

Old man

Marriage bed

New tables

Caterpillar

Dumb blonde

*Grand-daughter visiting

Hogmanay

Private

Prism

1972

July landing

Down and down

The white bird

Drop-out in Edinburgh

Drifting in a dinghy

The Little Falls Pool

Prospector

Horoscope

Woodsman

Landscape and I

Blackbird in a sunset bush

Back again, Lairg station

Morning song

Lesson

Elemental you

Return to Scalpay

Greenshank

Ringed plover by a water’s edge

Birthdays

If

In a whirl

From The World’s Room (mostly 1972–73)

The Pass of the Roaring

Pantheon

His son to Lacoön

Far gone in innocence

Two into one

Saying Yes is not enough

1973

Understanding

Wooden chair with arms

Still going

Cheese and wine party

Gone are the days

Two-year-old

In everything

Spendthrift

The unlikely as usual

Caterpillar going somewhere

Reversal

Stag in a neglected hayfield

Failed occasion

One way journey

A.K.’s summer hut

Discouraging

Small rain

1974

Bargain with a wren

Praise of a road

Praise of a collie

Praise of a boat

Praise of a thorn bush

Grandchild

*How I wonder what you are

*To be a leaf

Stars and planets

University staff club

A sigh for simplicity

See what you’ve done

Presents

Small lochs

1975

Fishermen’s pub

Three figures of Beethoven

Bus stop

Stonechat on Cul Beg

Beside a water

Means test

Composers of music

Summer evening in Assynt

Lucifer falling

Nothing too much

Venus

Goddess of lust

Report

Midnight encounter

1,800 feet up

Kingfisher

Close-ups of summer

Unposted birthday card

Ancestry

1976

Down-to-earth heaven

Water

Waxwing

Intrusion of the human

From Poems for Angus+ (1976–78)

Notes on a winter journey, and a footnote

A. K. MacLeod

Highland funeral

A month after his death

Triple burden

Comforter

Praise of a man

From his house door

Angus’s dog

Dead friend

In memoriam

Defeat

In all that whiteness

Miss Botticelli 1976

Fulfilled ambition

The shifts of spring

Notations of ten summer minutes

Heroes

Survivors

Scale

No interims in history

Folio

Intruder in a set scene

Back from holiday

Consequences

Being offered a Time Machine

1977

Connoisseur

Adrift

Tighnuilt – the House of the Small Stream

Request

Rowan berry

Highland games

Cormorants nesting

Cock before dawn

Thinned turnips

*Off Coigeach Point

Ineducable me

Report to the clan

Me as traveller

Classical translation

*A day and us

Cupid

Ends and means

Fisherman

Real life Christmas card

1978

Little Boy Blue

Sea change

Equilibrist

Two friends

The Kirk

Puffin

Earwig

Thorns

Journeys

Toad

Impatience

Bird of which feather?

Memorials

*Winter garden

1979

The way it goes

*Genealogy

Rag and bone

Blue tit on a string of peanuts

*A man I know

Writing a letter

Spring day

*Autobiographical note

Jumping toad

A true pleasure

Penelope

*Balances (1979)

Enough

Hard division

To create what?

1980

Helpless collector

Recipe

Circe

Also

Rewards and furies

Godot

Family of long-tailed tits

Zeno, and his like

Down and out

Queen of Scots

Go away, Ariel

*Sad tale

Daedalus

19th floor nightmare, New York

Bruce and that spider – the truth

*Creations

*Biblical discoveries

*View with no prospect

How to cover the ground

The first of them

The dolphin to Arion

City fog

In that other world

*Local dance

Clio

Neanderthal man

To explain you

*Gamekeeper’s widow

Old man in his chair

Two skulls

Bullfinch on guard in a hawthorn tree

Starling on a green lawn

Walking alone

*Encounter with a weasel

John Brown and Queen Victoria

Invasion of bees

Old couple in a bar

Yes

Below the Clisham, Isle of Harris: after many years

Hermes-Mercury

Two thieves

1981

Two thoughts of MacDiarmid in a quiet place

Pibroch: The Harp Tree

*Courage

Between us

Cheerful pagan

Bell heather

*Meeting a goddess, maybe

*Pine trees

Gin trap

Camera man

In folds of fire

A sort of physics

Trapped

Portrait bust

Escapism

One more

From where I sit

Theologian

In Hades

Gentle trap

*Landscape outside and in

Summer idyll

A man I agreed with

Woodcocks and philosophers

On a beach

Running bull

Characteristics

My last word on frogs

From my window

Dreams

Legends

A matter of scale

Foggy night

Ugly waking

The sea of sleep

*Portobello waterfront

Every day

*On the Lairg to Lochinver bus

Pastoral

Found guilty

Six schoolgirls

1982

*Gentle saboteur

A new age

Philosophy

Where we are

Beach scene

Man in the crowd

Seen in the city

No end to them

*Of you

Autumn

Neighbour

1983

Compare and contrast

*Double journey

Gray wagtail

By the graveyard, Luskentyre

1984

Her illness

*May morning

Big Top

Backward look

Highland barbecue

On the north side of Suilven

Old Highland woman

The dear green place

*At the Loch of the Pass of the Swans

Inside and out

Sealubber

Everywhere at Loch Roe

Bright day, dark centre

*Over and over again

A man walking through Clachtoll

Plea not to be deserted

Memory

On the pier at Kinlochbervie

Country cameo

Low tide

Daybreak

*Likenesses in a morning

*Shetland reel

*Haymaking

Between mountain and sea

1985

*Someone’s birthday

On a croft by the Kirkaig

Crofter

Two nights

Sounds and silences

Small boy

New flood

A man and his dreams

Getting where?

Crew

Foreboding in Eden

Buzzard circling

Heavenly party

A happiness

Apparition

Thinking of contradictions

In a snug room

1986

February – not everywhere

Other self, same self

Man, rabbit and owl

On Lachie’s croft

End of her illness

Seasonal notes – June

*Old shoes

Little girl

Perfect evening, Loch Roe

Wild snowstorm

Mountain streamlet

Sleepy time

April day in November, Edinburgh

Slow evening

Like you, like everyone

A room and a woman in it

That journey

Emblems: after her illness

Still is the night

1987

Chauvinist

Divider

Curlew

*Wester Ross, West Sutherland

*Deception

*Miracles? – no

*Fore and aft

Two sides of a bright day

*Poems for her

*Crystal of women

The many gifts

Poor world

*Uprising

1988

*Her name as everything

One day as any day

*Sargasso Sea

*Workaholic

Reading The Iliad

*Hope

*Maps

*Thinker

1989

*Memory, mother of the Muses

In an Edinburgh pub

Duncan, bedridden

London to Edinburgh

*Depths and heights

*High mountain loch

*Words, words – and time

The red and the black

*The Loch of the Peevish Creek

Nowheres

*Enemy of time

*Spring morning

*Idling at sea

*Against wind and tide

*Edinburgh stroll

*Highland ceilidh

*At the foot of Cul Mor

Two men at once

Dipper

*Kites

*Country lover

*Gaps in time

Sunset at Clashnessie

Nausicaa

*Impasse

1990

*Myself after her death 1

*Myself after her death 2

*Myself after her death 3

1991

*Five minutes at the window

*Things behind each other

*A sort of thanks

*A difference (1991)

*Contemporaries

*In the croft house called The Glen

*Languages

*Image of a man

*Assynt and Edinburgh

*Different musics

1992

*By the Three Lochans

*Processes

Dates not known

Deceptions?

Small journey

Visiting hour

Patriot

Old Sarah

It’s come to this

The tribes of men

Gale at Stoer Point

*Spinning minnow

*It sometimes happens

*After four sterile months

*Our neighbour’s cat

*Circles of dreams

*A small corner with a space in it

*On Handa

Married couple

*Stifling day

*Potter’s field

*Discolourations

*Decaying birch wood

*August 1922

*Nighthawk

Index of titles

About the Author

Copyright

+ The following twelve poems were presented in sequence in their original publication.

Editorial Note

Ewen McCaig

¹

THIS is the third collected (paperback) edition of my father’s poems. The first was published in 1985; the second, published in 1990, added later poems but was otherwise identical. Both bore the title, Collected Poems. This edition, The Poems of Norman MacCaig, contains more poems and other material. It is offered as the definitive (though not complete) MacCaig, because I believe the surviving poems not included here are below the standard set by the previous collection and therefore not suitable for publication.²

When my father died in 1996 he left a large number of unpublished poems. Ninety-nine were selected for inclusion here, giving 792 in all. Contextualisation of the poetry is provided in Alan Taylor’s introduction and in a selection of my father’s own words.

Two editorial issues had to be resolved. One was the order of presentation. Previous editions of the Collected Poems (compiled by my father) presented material from the original books in order of publication, though with exclusions and additions of individual poems. Here, the poems are presented in order of writing. The other issue was the inclusion of work unpublished at the time of his death. He usually disparaged the published gleanings from the estates of other poets and his admonition, ‘Don’t let them publish a lot of rubbish after I’m dead!’ still sounds in my mind. I must now justify the inclusion of unpublished poems and describe the selection process undertaken to reject the ‘rubbish’.

The specifics of producing another collection after his death would not have interested my father towards the end of his life and they were never discussed. However, I was helped in resolving these issues by knowledge of my father’s way of working and a perception of his wishes based on many conversations.

Norman MacCaig was born in 1910. He wrote poetry from school age, but took many years to find his voice. The MacCaig his readers would recognise emerged in about 1947, when he adopted a more lucid and disciplined style. Poems written before then were disowned, including two early books: Far Cry and The Inward Eye. He later published fourteen ‘slim volumes’ as he termed them. These were: Riding Lights (1955); The Sinai Sort (1957); A Common Grace (1960); A Round of Applause (1962); Measures (1965); Surroundings (1966); Rings on a Tree (1968); A Man in my Position (1969); The White Bird (1973); The World’s Room (1974); Tree of Strings (1977); The Equal Skies (1980); A World of Difference (1983); Voice-Over (1988). The Collected editions contain most poems from the slim volumes plus a selection of others that had not been published in books, or at all.

When altering his style in 1947 he also changed his approach to organising his work, writing on loose sheets rather than in notebooks. Each sheet contained a single poem, with its serial number and the month and year of writing. From time to time, usually in preparation for publication, he would unwillingly type a selection of poems, preserving their numbers and dates. Minor amendments were often made during, or following, this process. Many of the typescripts contain holograph amendments. The amendment process never entirely stopped, even following publication: his own copies of the books, including the final Collected Poems, contain a small number of amendments, which are reflected here.

He kept up this organisational approach for the rest of his life. The earliest poem included here is numbered 54 and was written in December 1947; the last, number 3,897, was written in January 1992. He therefore wrote about 3,900 poems during his forty-five years of mature production, of which 693 were published in the 1990 Collected and some 400 remain in manuscript. In total, about 1,100 still exist. The missing 2,800 were not good enough, so he destroyed them.

My father certainly never shaped his creative output with individual books in mind. The seed of each poem was a moment’s inspiration or memory and, as he told me, the poems were often completely forgotten almost as soon as written (something entirely credible to those who knew him well). Despite the themes that run strongly through his work, the poems, with few exceptions, were discrete events and book selections were made from the stockpile available at the time. He always had a large supply of unpublished poems, even after completing the selection for a book. This is partly because he believed in selecting only from new material. Poems that had appeared in periodicals or been used in readings were not allowed in books, so many poems did not appear in the fourteen individual collections, despite having been disseminated by the author in other ways. While he held to this principle closely, a few may have been read and publication in the Collected editions was allowed.

On looking through my father’s papers after his death I found about 600 unpublished poems.³ About 200 predated his change of style so, as he had publicly rejected all this early work, they were not considered for publication here. The rest were from his mature period and could be considered. It would have been excessively precious and a negation of responsibility to interpret his injunction not to publish ‘rubbish’ as an all-embracing ban – principles apart, there were too many good poems. Considerations of principle vary, depending on when the poems were written. I have no concerns about publishing a selection of poems from the period approaching and following the 1990 edition of the Collected Poems, because they were not available for inclusion. However, even when considering work that could have been in the 1990 collection, it is far from evident that all the poems were decisively rejected. For one thing, he had kept them despite having destroyed most of his unpublished work. Also, although he was keen to reject poor work, he was often indecisive about individual poems. It appeared that the process of selection for books caused him far more difficulty than writing the poems in the first place. He told me on a number of occasions that there were poems he later wished he had included in the 1990 collection and our conversations in his old age sometimes touched on the topic of his recent work, without any suggestion that it should remain forever unpublished. What he objected to was indiscriminate publication of juvenilia and other unworthy relics.

Other considerations may explain why some individual poems were never published. One is that he felt some poems were more suitable for public readings than print and his productivity meant there were always plenty available for the books. It seems right that poems he read to the public should be available in print after his death. A small number of poems may have been withheld because of content that could be related to individuals then alive. A practical consideration is that his strategy for ordering his work methodically was not put into effective practice. I believe that numerous poems must have lain unnoticed for years in the chaos of his papers.

Much of the unpublished work included here is from his later years. Of the 99 poems selected, nineteen date from 1961–79 and 25 are from 1980–86. All of these could have been included in the 1990 collection, although his tendency to hoard recent work made those from 1980–86 more likely to be bypassed. Forty-four date from 1987–92. Many of these were from 1987–89 and may have been considered for the 1990 Collected. However, it seems unlikely that many were genuine candidates, although a few others from this period were included. Despite his age, he had hoped to cap the Collected with another slim volume so, feeling that his productivity was diminishing, he became reluctant to include many recent poems there. His words to me were, ‘I’m not giving the buggers everything.’ Not many of the poems from 1989–1992 were typed and very few of the later ones appear to have been amended at all. The ambition to produce another book was defeated by age and tiredness.

Thirteen of the unpublished poems are undated and a few of these have been taken from sources such as magazine cuttings found among his papers.

My father left quite a number of poems in the fourteen books out of the collected editions, especially from the earlier volumes. Although these were not considered for this edition, a few inadvertently made their way into the selection process and two made it through to the final list. Bearing in mind his expressed regrets about poems excluded from the Collected Poems, I have allowed these two to remain.

Having decided that including unpublished work would not disrespect the author’s wishes, it remained to make a cautious selection. The 200 poems from his early period were disregarded. Some of the 400 mature poems were second-rate by MacCaig standards. Many others contained good things but were flawed, including some of the late poems that had not been revised. All such were rejected: editorial amendment has been limited to a very few corrections of obvious drafting errors. The chosen 99 are about a quarter of those remaining following the author’s own ruthless cull from about 3,200 to 400 – a long way from the bottom of the barrel.

The first task of selecting from the 400 poems was to prepare a shortlist, which I did in consultation with my sister. The 130 shortlisted poems were passed to Tom Pow and Alan Taylor, whose help in deciding the final set of 99 was invaluable. The objective was to select poems that, as a group, would not dilute the quality of the 1990 collection. I believe the objective has been met, although, as with any selection, others would have chosen differently. Inevitably, some poems are on the margin but that applies equally to some of those included in the Collected by my father. A few are among my personal favourites. The later poems may be of particular interest as they add significantly to the published work from his old age.

The other editorial issue was ordering the poems. An option was to complement the text of the 1990 collection. This followed the sequence of the fourteen books. Within each book, the order was retained, though some poems were excluded, mostly from the earlier books. Additional poems, from about the time of writing, followed each book. This format could have been retained, with the new poems added at the end or interspersed among the previous additional poems. However, I preferred to present the poems in the order of writing, while flagging the new poems as they appear in the text. His practice of numbering and dating his poems made this approach possible.

An objection to this is that the original order of the poems would have been selected by the author to provide a meaningful or, at least, readable sequence. This is a valid point: the order will not have been arbitrary. However, while my father discussed issues around the selection of poems with me on numerous occasions, he never referred to ordering. I don’t think it was a concern that ranked highly with him. Even if it did, how far can the selection of order in individual books be sustained meaningfully in a larger collection? To some extent, it has been lost already, because poems were rejected. Also, he did not want the 1990 collection to be his last words. It is not possible to say whether, if he were alive to consider the presentation of his lifetime’s work, my father would have retained an ordering system that, to me, now looks scrappy and piecemeal. Of the 792 poems here, 221 did not appear in the original fourteen books. Any attempt to retain elements of the original ordering would therefore have been partial and unsatisfactory.

Another reason to consider change is that this is no longer a book that readers might swallow whole. A book of 60 or 70 poems is not the same as a collection of over ten times that number: readers will browse, dip and refer. The principal effect of retaining the book order might be to give an impression that the collection consisted of two classes of poem, which I do not believe to be the case. The poems were not created in that way.

Therefore I adopted the principle of ordering by time. There is, of course, a correlation with the book ordering, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. The ordering task was possible because nearly all the poems were numbered and dated. Very occasionally, the number and date sequences did not match, although the differences were never significant. I have used the date in such cases. I believe my father would have got the month right, so his picking up the wrong ‘last’ sheet to get the next number is the most credible hypothesis.

There is one significant interruption in the presentation by date: I was unable to trace the manuscript and typescript of his fourth book, A Round of Applause. The poems from this book are inserted in a group at about the right time. A very small number of poems from other books have been similarly treated and 22 undated poems are placed at the end. Generally, though, the order is preserved very well.

There is only one sequence of poems in my father’s work: the twelve Poems for Angus. They were written between March 1976 and January 1978. The sequence has been preserved and the poems are presented in the order in which they appeared in The Equal Skies.

The poems in the book are dated. The previously unpublished poems are identified by an asterisk following the date and are marked in the contents and index in the same way.

Clearly, the poems are the main substance of this book. However, three further elements are included. The introduction, by Alan Taylor, mainly discusses MacCaig’s life and times. Quotations from MacCaig also gives context to the poetry. Most of the material comes from interviews with my father undertaken by Anette Degott in 1986 and 1988, as part of a PhD thesis on his work. Her interviews explored the topics of interest in more depth (and length) than in, for example, broadcast interviews. The material has been selected, edited and ordered by me. It mainly covers topics related to his own writing.

1 Many people have questioned the spelling of my father’s name. He used ‘MacCaig’ for writing and the original ‘McCaig’ for all other purposes.

2 This reflects my father’s wishes although, as his literary executor, decisions on individual poems became my responsibility after his death. Unpublished poems and other writings can be found mainly in the Norman MacCaig Archive at Edinburgh University Library. Quotations from unpublished poems will be allowed when they are contextualised and their status acknowledged.

3 Though I refer to them as such, some will have appeared in periodicals and a very few appeared in the Selected edition by Douglas Dunn, now out of print.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Tom Pow and Alan Taylor for their help in selecting previously unpublished poems for inclusion here and to Anette Degott-Reinhardt, who provided transcripts of interviews with my father and was generous with her help in identifying and reviewing other material.

Norman MacCaig: an Introduction

Alan Taylor

THERE is every possibility that Norman MacCaig would not have approved of this introduction. When I first wrote about him in The Scotsman newspaper nearly a quarter of a century ago it took all the courage I could muster to ask him what he thought of it. ‘All right as far as it goes, I suppose,’ was the extent of his response. He insisted he was allergic to prose, which he wrote sparingly and reluctantly. Indeed he once claimed that he never read novels, which the many visitors to his flat in Edinburgh will testify was preposterous. When asked to write a note by way of a preface to Scottish Eccentrics by Hugh MacDiarmid, MacCaig vowed that it would be ‘a limited note at that’.

MacDiarmid (with whom MacCaig is connected as Wordsworth was to Coleridge) was ‘a tough subject’ – a walking, talking, gesticulating mass of contradictions. ‘Say something about him that is true and before the words are out of your mouth you remember that the opposite is also true.’ MacDiarmid and MacCaig were chalk and cheese – physically, temperamentally, aesthetically, politically, you name it. They were bonded through poetry and friendship. MacDiarmid was built like a Border terrier, with a head of hair which seemed permanently to be on fire; MacCaig was as tall as a poppy, with the profile of a Roman emperor and the thin, sarcastic lips of a hanging judge. Some of MacDiarmid’s best poems were written in Scots, which MacCaig chose not to use. MacDiarmid was a Communist and a Nationalist and, depending on the mood of the moment, a Fascist. ‘He is a materialist and visionary,’ wrote MacCaig. ‘He is immoralist in principle and puritan in practice.’

MacCaig ought to be easier to sum up, but he is not. Genealogically, he said, he was ‘a three-quarter Gael’. Three of his grandparents were Gaels and the fourth hailed from Dumfriesshire. ‘He’s the one who gets me to places on time,’ he wrote in an autobiographical essay for Chapman magazine. Though he holidayed in the north-west of Scotland he was a city dweller all his life. He was apolitical and a pacifist and during the Second World War spent 93 days in Wormwood Scrubs as a conscientious objector. He was unshakeable in his abhorrence of all wars and suspicious of ‘big words’ such as glory, liberty, patriotism and democracy. He would surely have sympathised with MacDiarmid when he wrote that ‘most of the important words were killed in the First World War’.

Throughout his poetry there is an unsentimental attachment to Scotland – its history, landscape, fauna, flora and people. In his longest poem, ‘A man in Assynt’, he rose to rhetorical anger at the injustices heaped on local communities by a distant government and imperious landlords:

Who owns this landscape? –

The millionaire who bought it or

the poacher staggering downhill in the early morning

with a deer on his back?

Who possesses this landscape? –

The man who bought it or

I who am possessed by it?

Asked to sum up his religion, MacCaig invariably replied: ‘Zen Calvinist’.

Norman Alexander MacCaig was born on 14 November 1910. His father, Robert, who came from Haugh-of-Ur in Dumfriesshire, was a pharmaceutical chemist in a shop in Dundas Street in Edinburgh’s New Town. ‘It was a white-collar job,’ MacCaig recalled, ‘and he wore fly-away stiff collars all his life … very, very, very boorjoysie.’ His mother, Joan, née McLeod, was from Scalpay, a small island near Harris. Joan was sixteen when she arrived in Edinburgh and found work as a domestic servant. She and Robert married in December 1906. At first she spoke no English but she soon acquired enough to ‘run circles round professors of Sanskrit’. According to her son, she thought predominantly in images and metaphors, a talent he inherited.

Around the age of twelve, MacCaig began to visit Scalpay, which was to have a profound influence on him:

Those teenage visits to Scalpay, I didn’t realise how important they were to me at the time but looking back it’s the first time I began to realise that I had ancestors, not just my mother and father. They gave me a connection. It was meeting my aunts and my cousins there made me realise that I was a miniscule and unimportant part of history. No, that’s putting it too portentously. I felt I belonged to people in a way that I hadn’t before, except to my parents.

Much as MacCaig liked Scalpay and could relate to its inhabitants, of whom there were fewer than one hundred,