The best of enemies – Ian Hamilton Finlay and Hugh MacDiarmid

But before we got down to business that day, I found myself involved in a conversation not about Ure, but about the early biography of the poet, artist, and gardener, Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006). Though hardly to the immediate point, it was, in fact, in researching Finlay’s early career, as I’ve been doing for much of the past decade, that I first began to learn about Ure. I initially encountered her as Elizabeth Clark, her married name: she adopted the pen-name in the early 1960s. A friend of Finlay’s from several years previously, they were fellow dramatists for a time. As prose writers, both had benefited, as had their mutual friend Archie Hind, from the editorial support of Anne Donaldson at The Glasgow Herald.

Riach and I were swiftly caught up in talking about the relationship between Finlay and another pseudonymous author, the poet and cultural crackerjack Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve, 1892-1978). After a rapid to and fro, Riach asked whether the information I was providing – really, a series of amendments to the established narrative – had been published anywhere.

“Not yet,” I said.

It turned out that with Professor Emeritus Stephen Bann of Bristol University, Riach had recently been invited to participate in an event taking place in October, concerning the two writers – “The Best of Enemies” – at the Biggar Little Festival. Bann is a cultural historian with whom Finlay had enjoyed an extended period of friendship and intellectual collaboration from the time of their first meeting in Edinburgh in 1964.

This event hopes to open a dialogue between those two illustrious poetic controversialists, with Riach commenting primarily on MacDiarmid, while Bann will speak from the inside about Finlay. And why Biggar? As is well known, the two late adversaries had coincidentally come to live only a few miles from one another in that area of South Lanarkshire – the Black Mount lying emphatically between.

MacDiarmid arrived at Brownsbank with his wife, Valda, in 1950, and sixteen years later Finlay, with his wife Sue and their family, moved into an upland farm in the parish of Dunsyre. Stonypath is now best known as the site of Little Sparta, the celebrated poet’s garden that in the course of the next twenty years and more, the Finlays worked to establish around that house. This astonishing achievement, neo-classicism at the very edge – bordering moorland, with a climate to suit, yet known and cherished internationally – is now owned and managed by the Little Sparta Trust. Appropriately enough, Magnus Linklater, who chairs the Trust, but is also familiar with the view from the other side of that intervening hill, will chair proceedings later this month in Biggar.

Little is known in detail about much of Finlay’s career until, as it were, he enters history with the publication in late 1960 – in Worcester, England and Ventura, California – of his own first poetry collection, “The Dancers Inherit the Party”. This is not to understate the significance of the insights on the early period that have emerged in recent decades, not least from Finlay’s son, the poet and artist Alec Finlay, and from the poet and translator Ken Cockburn, nor to discount the value of the biographical information provided, for example, in Yves Abrioux’s Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer (1985), though history and myth there do now rather patently overlap. Arguably, one could revise that date to late 1958, when Finlay’s first and only collection of short stories was published in Edinburgh, “The Sea-Bed and Other Stories”, although uncertainty concerning that stage in his life still remains.

The present article is intended to help fill the gap identified when Riach led us onto the subject earlier this year. Inevitably it will fall short. I’d welcome any information where there are gaps.

Accounts of their involvement with one another from the early 1960s, when Finlay and MacDiarmid were locked into an increasingly vituperative and very public series of literaery “flytings”, and thereafter an apparently enduring enmity, are frequently accompanied by the somewhat surprising information that the elder was best man at Finlay’s first marriage. Surprising perhaps, but certainly true. Indeed, it seems that when that Finlay married Marion Fletcher, in Glasgow, December 1947, he did so with a ring that was not only carried but actually supplied by the best man, one he borrowed from Valda. While this seems simply to have been a matter of practical need, apparently unforeseen, the implications on a symbolic level are surely thought-provoking.

Hugh MacDiarmid dedicated Poems of the East-West Synthesis (1947) to Ian Hamilton Finlay

EARLIER, as Cockburn mentions, in January 1943, MacDiarmid had also favoured him with a letter of recommendation that he sent to the anarchist London bookseller and publisher Charles Lahr. In fact, he wrote at least one further letter on the same day, to the poet and publisher John Lehmann, similarly praising his “young friend”

(Finlay was then barely 17), keen to embark on a literary career in the city.

MacDiarmid had many useful connections throughout literary Britain, but Finlay himself (like his mentor) already knew the London that was centred around the Kensington studio of the then ascendant Scottish painters, “the two Roberts”, Colquhoun and MacBryde. Indeed, Finlay had hitchhiked there previously, probably more than once. Stories of a torpedo truck, an arrest on suspicion when his bag was found to contain a work of German literature, and an elopement with the woman he would later marry, provide evidence of this. They also suggest qualities of character and inclination – and at his age, remarkable freedom of action – although they do not in themselves contribute much to the MacDiarmid part of his story.

Yet two points do arise, one general and one specific. As regards the latter, it may well have been MacDiarmid who helped when his protégé, by then serving in the Army, wished to re-establish communication with Marion. (The elopement had ended abruptly.) Finlay’s request for help in this matter was made probably sometime in 1946, in one of the dozen letters to MacDiarmid – addressed, of course, as Chris – that are held in the library of the University of Edinburgh. Finlay was always a very prolific letter-writer, though only a limited number survive till the early 1960s (mostly undated). Of those from his time in the Army (1944-47), it is only in his letters to “Chris” that Finlay mentions Marion, telling him in around June 1947 (I estimate) that he has asked her to marry him. Given the circumstances of the happy event – and naturally they were very much in love – MacDiarmid (like Marion herself) must have been the ideal choice. His role as older confidant, held in the highest esteem by the artistically ambitious groom, may also have helped offset any misgivings within the families.

FINLAY was certainly artistically ambitious, but he nevertheless designates himself “farmer” on the marriage certificate. This may seem surprising, but it is consistent with later unrealised hopes of making a living by crofting (for example in Orkney), and it may also evoke both his period as a shepherd in Perthshire in the 40s and the gruelling piece-work on which he partly depended there in the 50s. But it is also interesting to consider the ways in which the art of land management, at least, was combined with those of poetry and revolution in the sometime ferme armée of Little Sparta. Certainly, his heart was always in the country.

Regarding the events leading up to that marriage, in January this year, a bookseller friend happened to show me a copy of a 1946 pamphlet by MacDiarmid, “Poems of the East-West Synthesis”. Noting that it had been signed for “Ian Findlay” in July 1947, in Carlisle (where MacDiarmid was then working), I could see immediately that it comprised a rare fragment in a jigsaw of relationships of which almost all the other pieces must by now have been lost. For in the letter cited above – estimated at June 1947 – Finlay refers to the possibility of meeting MacDiarmid precisely in Carlisle. It may even have been there and then that the latter agreed to be best man, when he was so moved at the prospect as to have mislaid the correct spelling of his young friend’s surname. (Not for the last time, as we shall see.) Finlay was demobbed, in York, in November 1947, and was married the following month.

We’ll come back next week to the second, more general point: the context of wartime Glasgow in which the two poets first met.

The Best of Enemies is on Wednesday, October 23, at 7pm for 7.30pm, at the Corn Exchange, Biggar, when Magnus Linklater will chair a discussion between Professor Alan Riach and Professor Stephen Bann on the connections and disconnections between Hugh MacDiarmid and Ian Hamilton Finlay. Not a war of words, but a fascinating inspection of these two controversial and maverick literary giants from the 20th-century Scottish cultural scene. Atkinson-Pryce Books hosts the event, which is sponsored by Atlas Winch and Hoist. All proceeds will be shared equally between the charitable trusts of Little Sparta and MacDiarmid’s Brownsbank. Tickets available (£11) from BLF Box Office or Atkinson-Pryce Books on 01899 221225 email: tomes@atkinson-pryce.co.uk. See: https://www.biggarlittlefestival.com/literature/best-of-enemies