MacDiarmid by Bold Alan;

Author:Bold, Alan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 1983-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

FRAE BATTLES, MAIR THAN BALLADS

Reivers to weavers and to me. Weird way!

Yet in the last analysis I've sprung

Frae battles, mair than ballads

'Kinsfolk' (1150)

In 1929 MacDiarmid exchanged the comparative security he enjoyed in Montrose for the bigger opportunities he thought would be available in London. He felt it was time for a change. His wife Peggy did not care for the smalltown atmosphere of Montrose and MacDiarmid thought the job Compton Mackenzie offered him as editor of the radio magazine Vox promised a big financial improvement on his position and, moreover, represented a worthwhile journalistic challenge. He had come to feel that conditions in Montrose were no longer in his creative interests; that, at any rate, is the way he portrayed the situation in To Circumjack Cencrastus (1930), the long poem that was planned as a worthy successor to A Drunk Man. Unfortunately it was nothing of the kind. In A Drunk Man, as we have seen, MacDiarmid portrayed the thistle-crucified Scot rising to resurrection - in Montrose, coincidentally — as 'A greater Christ, a greater Burns'. (86) In Cencrastus the saviour-poet has too many local difficulties and virtually acknowledges defeat:

Thrang o' ideas that like fairy gowd

'll leave me the 'Review' reporter still

Waukenin' to my clung-kite faimly on a hill

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