The Folkniks in the Kailyard: Hamish Henderson and the ‘Folk-song Flyting’

Corey Gibson

This chapter is an examination of the ‘Folk-song Flyting’ between Hamish Henderson and Hugh MacDiarmid, which raged in the pages of the Scotsman throughout 1964. It uncovers some of the connections between the folk revivalists’ agenda, as represented in Henderson’s work, and contemporary debates among Scottish writers, particularly those among Edwin Morgan and a new generation of writers who sought to distance themselves from MacDiarmid’s coterie. The ‘Flyting’ is situated as a dramatic, condensed account of Scotland’s literary landscape in the 1960s. Keywords: folk revival, Literary Renaissance, Hamish Henderson, Hugh MacDiarmid, politics, poetry.

In March 1964 the literary historian David Craig wrote to the Scotsman lambasting the Scottish Home Service for their part in the underrepresentation of Scottish folk-song in popular cultural life. Craig was also reacting to what he saw as a growing problem: the depreciation of this traditional oral idiom by Scotland’s well-known poets. He singled out Norman MacCaig for criticism, reporting that the poet had recently proclaimed: ‘folksongs might be good enough for berry-pickers and steel mill workers, but not for him – he had read Homer.1 Responding to the poet’s snobbery, Craig insisted that, at their best, Scotland’s ballads were equal ‘in quality, in beauty and truth if not in scale’ to the great European epics.2 A few days later Hugh MacDiarmid countered Craig’s letter with his own contribution to the ‘Points of View’ column in the Scotsman. He described folk- song as inherently antithetical to the demands of modern literature, and in doing so he lit the touch-paper of a vigorous, drawn-out public dispute that lasted into the summer of that year. Though many contributed to this discussion, MacDiarmid and the poet, songwriter and folklorist, Hamish Henderson, quickly established themselves as the principle combatants. This series of exchanges became known as their ‘Folk-song Flyting’. Henderson first came to prominence with the publication of his series of war poems based on his experiences in the North African campaign, Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (1948). As well as translating German and Italian poetry, writing essays and articles on 210 Corey Gibson all aspects of cultural and political life in Scotland, and composing many well-loved folksongs, Henderson was one of the leading proponents of the modern Scottish folk revival in the 1950s and 1960s. He spent the greater part of his career collecting, cataloguing, and disseminating folklore for the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh. During the ‘Flyting’, Henderson celebrated the vitality of the folk tradition in Scotland and the long-established and intimate relationship it had enjoyed with Scotland’s literary culture, insisting on the political as well as artistic merits of a revived folk culture. MacDiarmid, in stark contrast, dismissed folk-song as a moribund, outmoded form, perhaps useful to a pre-industrial popula- tion, yet redundant in the face of contemporary demands for ‘higher and higher intellectual levels’.3 Together they staged a public dialogue between two sets of ideas about the relationship between art and society that was both rooted emphatically in contemporary debates among Scottish writers and tied closely to the fundamental issues of aesthetics and cultural politics that belong to every epoch. We might approach this public dispute as one between Henderson as the unofficial father of the modern Scottish folk revival, and MacDiarmid as the doyen of the interwar literary Renaissance. Indeed, Henderson was convinced that the folk revival could become an extension of MacDiarmid’s celebrated Renaissance, though the poet himself resisted this claim on his legacy in the strongest possible terms. The aim of this chapter is to reveal, through an analysis of the ‘Flyting’, some of the connections between the folk revivalists’ agenda, as represented in Henderson’s work, and contemporary debates among Scottish writers. Though the ‘Flyting’ captures the volatility of these issues, hyperbole and polemics tend to obscure the importance of what was at stake. Beneath the rhetorical posturing, the ‘Flyting’ is an intense dramatic account of Scotland’s literary landscape in the 1960s. Henderson, MacDiarmid, and the other contri- butors addressed the place of poetry in modern Scottish society; they touched on the incursions of mass culture, the role of the avant-garde, divergent conceptions of authorship, and the problem of the ‘popular’ in the prescription of literary value. Craig’s letter, which marked the beginning of this ‘Flyting’, mentioned Homer alongside the programming policies of the Scottish Home Service. Even at its inception, the ‘Flyting’ is therefore concerned with the very foundations of the Western literary canon as