Thank You to Bob Purdie for this article (Hugh MacDiarmid Appreciation Society) Last month the Scottish composer James MacMillan published an article in The Scotsman which contained slanderous and untrue allegations against the late Hugh MacDiarmid. I submitted the reply below, showing clearly why they were untrue, it has not been published. It seems that it is acceptable to slander a dead poet, but not to courteously take to task a living composer on the basis of clear evidence. Hugh MacDiarmid and Fascism, a reply to James MacMillan. James MacMillan’s essay [Scotsman 30th April 2014] makes a series of inaccurate and unjustified allegations about Hugh MacDiarmid. These have become the established wisdom through constant repetition, without any attempt to find out whether or not they are true. And as they are repeated they become exaggerated, for example the idea that Clann Albain was a “fascist paramilitary organisation”. The existence of a Scottish nationalist fascist para-military organisation at that time has gone quite unrecorded by any reputable historian. There was a group which used the name, it was founded in 1929 by MacDiarmid, along with Compton Mackenzie and Erskine of Mar. It seems to have been for the purposes of civil disobedience, but it never got off the ground and it was never remotely fascist. Can anyone really imagine Compton Mackenzie as a Storm Trooper? There was also a fictional organisation of the same name, to which MacDiarmid referred in his “Scotland in 1980” also of 1929. He described it as “neo-fascist” and the fictional and the real organisations have been conflated. We should note the term, “neo-fascist”. In our day it refers to post-1945 attempts to revive the fascism of the pre-War era, but in 1929 it could only mean that his imaginary Clann Albain was not meant to be the same as the Hitler or Mussolini movements. Just how it would be different he did not make clear, but he never promoted the creation of a fascist movement and he never advocated a Scottish dictator – not even himself. In his correspondence with Sorley MacLean MacDiarmid did not say that the Nazis were “potentially more benign rulers than the British government”. What he actually wrote was, “… although the Germans are appalling enough and in a short term more murderously destructive, they cannot win – but the British and French bourgeoisie can, and is a far greater enemy.” This was a discussion between two Communists. Maclean thought that the defence of the USSR was best served by joining the British Army to fight Nazism, MacDiarmid took the ultra-left view that the main enemy was at home. So it is a gross distortion to claim that he had “pro-Nazi sentiments” during WW2 and it is also extremely silly. MacDiarmid had declared himself to be a Communist, he had fallen out with the Party but the Gestapo would not have been interested in such fine distinctions. He must have known that in the event of a Nazi victory he would have been arrested as soon they got the length of Shetland. As for the “fascist” articles of 1923, why not actually read them instead of being spooked by the titles? And remember that they were published nine years before Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists, ten years before the Nazis seized power, sixteen years before the Second World War and twenty years before the Holocaust. Mussolini had not yet established a totalitarian dictatorship (which happened in 1925) and MacDiarmid did not “praise” his regime. He speculated that the idea of combining nationalism and socialism, as the Fascists claimed to be doing, might have lessons for Scotland. But the most important political action he advocated was for young unemployed men to go to the Western Isles to seize land and defy the British government to dislodge them. This was a Scottish agrarian version of the Italian factory occupations, which the Blackshirts had just suppressed with great brutality. In other words it was the precise opposite of a fascist strategy. As for the poem about bombing London, it wasn’t published in his lifetime – unlike John Betjeman who did publish his poem about friendly bombs falling on Slough. No one imagines that Betjeman actually wanted the town to be obliterated because his poem is understood as expressing his distaste for mass society and consumer culture. And also because few people think it sensible to read poems as literal programmatic statements. The meaning of MacDiarmid’s poem was conveyed in the lines: For London is the centre of all reaction To progress and prosperity in human existence - Set against all that is good in the spirit of man As Earth’s greatest stumbling block and rock of offence. There might be objection to his depiction of London as a world centre of reaction but, like the Slough poem, it is about the characteristics of a place, not a hymn of approval for its devastation. James MacMillan starts a completely new hare by speculating that MacDiarmid was influenced to support fascism by the Futurists. Before this runs any further, perhaps he could give us some evidence – so far it has escaped the attention of established MacDiarmid scholars. Maybe that’s because he is as inaccurate about the Futurists as he is about MacDiarmid. Futurism was an early twentieth century artistic movement that lauded the drama of Italian Fascism and Russian Bolshevism. But both regimes were suspicious of it because it was too intellectually independent and it all ended in tears. But no artists will weep after the Scottish referendum, not even James MacMillan and Allan Bisset, because neither British Unionism nor Scottish Nationalism is fascist. Now can we discuss the real issues? Bob Purdie. (Dr. Bob Purdie is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Research Institute for Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen. He is the author of Hugh MacDiarmid Black Green Red and Tartan, Welsh Academic Press, 2012.)
Posted on: Tue, 08 Jul 2014 02:04:34 +0000
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