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This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: • This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. • A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. • This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. • The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. • When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. Norman MacCaig and the Fascination of Existence by Nathalie S. Ingrassia PhD thesis presented to the College of Humanities and Social Science The University of Edinburgh 2013 Declaration of Originality This is to certify that the work contained within has been composed by me and is entirely my own work. No part of this thesis has been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. Nathalie Ingrassia 1 Abstract This thesis is a comprehensive study of the poetry of Norman MacCaig. His poems have received relatively little critical attention and scholars appear to have concentrated on a few specific points such as MacCaig’s characteristic restraint or his inscription in a given literary tradition. Critics have notably pointed out different dichotomies in his works. I argue that these dichotomies are fundamentally inter- related. It is characteristic of MacCaig’s writing to simultaneously engage with and challenge philosophical and linguistic concepts and positions as well as literary traditions and stylistic choices. These dichotomies are both a cause and a symptom of this phenomenon. They take on a structuring role in a body of works often regarded as a collection of independent lyrics rather than a cohesive totality. The first half of the thesis will follow a thematic approach: considering first the poetic project MacCaig outlines and the interplay of celebration, faithfulness to the object and the problem of perception; then the treatment of religion and the divine by this notoriously atheist author and how it relates to his worldview. This will provide a basis to address MacCaig’s lifelong concern with the relationship between perception, language and description and what this entails for both his writing and his philosophical positions. In the second half of this study, I will address MacCaig’s engagement with tradition – and its limits – through consideration of three different modes and how they relate to his writing project: elegy, pastoral and amatory verse, regarding the latter two as specific examples of the former. Through these interconnected studies of MacCaig’s poetry, I argue that the critical tendency to 2 either undervalue his central place or treat his works in a fragmentary fashion originates in MacCaig’s sense of the instability of our perceptions and our possible discourses about the world. This uncertainty at the root of his writing reflects his constant and often uncomfortable awareness of the elusive nature of existence and meaning – death and the limits of language threatening both his perception of the world he evinces such fondness for and his ability to write about it. 3 Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank my supervisors, Drs. Carole Jones and Alex Thomson, without whom I might have given up on MacCaig and his confusing ways. Their constant support over the past three years has inspired me the confidence I needed to make my research truly my own – thankfully, their judicious guidance has also guarded me from somewhat less judicious but beloved pet ideas. I am immensely grateful to Dr. Carole Jones for her infinite patience as she let me ramble on about MacCaig until the ideas fell into place. The role this has played in allowing me to devise my argument cannot be overestimated. Dr. Alex Thomson, my primary supervisor, has the uncanny gift of seeing where I might be going with an idea before I do, which did greatly simplify matters whenever I was floundering helplessly in an ocean of unrelated points. The kind people of the Centre for Research Collections at the University library, and more particularly Dr. Paul Barnaby have also contributed greatly to this thesis by helping me to find my way through the University’s collection of MacCaig’s personal papers – may they be praised for their great patience that has permitted me to finally access documents which, though they are only referred to once here, have given me a better grasp of who the man behind the poems was. I will also come away from this experience with a profound gratitude for the University of Edinburgh itself, which has such an excellent library and grants its PhD candidates the opportunity to become tutors. There is much to learn from teaching undergraduates, and my research is richer of everything it has taught me. 4 Table of contents Declaration of originality 1 Abstract 2 Acknowledgements 4 Table of contents 5 Introduction 7 A – Situating MacCaig: influences, affinities and critical context 8 B – Aims and structure of this study 40 I – “To let things be”: Realism as moral imperative 48 A – The pursuit of realism 57 B – MacCaig’s take on writing faithfully 69 C – The moral dimension 79 D – Conclusion 89 II – MacCaig’s “descending grace” 91 A – “I atheist, god-hater”: the paradox 94 B – “The dying Ca lvinist in me”: the empty space 104 C – Conclusions 118 III – “The language of disguise”: MacCaig and metaphor 125 A – MacCaig, tradition and metaphor 132 B – The paradoxical exactness of metaphor 145 C – The implications: reality according to MacCaig 160 D – Conclusion 169 5 IV – “I hate death, the skull-maker”: MacCaig and elegy 172 A – MacCaig’s engagement with the tradition of mourning elegy 178 B – The inadequacies of elegy: anti-elegiac writing 190 C – The art of losing 195 D – The limit experience of death in MacCaig’s poems 203 E – Conclusion 215 V – Pastoral MacCaig 219 A – MacCaig’s pastoral 221 B – Beyond pastoralism 238 C – Conclusion 262 VI – The problematic mode: Norman MacCaig’s love lyrics 264 A – MacCaig’s problematic inscription within the European tradition of the love lyric 268 B – A study in separation: poetry of the mind? 299 C – Conclusion 316 Conclusion 320 Works cited 325 Appendix: The WORLD IS WORD tropes network 337 6 INTRODUCTION MacCaig occupies a central place in Scottish poetry. Becoming the first Writer in Residence at the University of Edinburgh in 1967 before occupying a similar position in Stirling from 1970 to his retirement in 1978, MacCaig was moreover made a member of the O.B.E in 1979 and received the Queen’s Medal for Poetry in 1985. He was a well-known figure of the 1950s and 1960s social, literary – and pub – life in Edinburgh1. George Mackay Brown, in a 1990 short essay, “Poet’s Pub: a Personal Tribute,” attests to this and emphasises MacCaig’s sociable and welcoming nature. The interest in his poetry persists to this day – a new edition of his complete poems which includes previously unpublished texts came out in 2009, as well as another volume entitled Selected Poems on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of his birth. Born in 1910 in Edinburgh where he lived until his passing in 1996, MacCaig defines himself as “a hundred percent” Scottish (qtd in Riach “The Poetry of Experience” 559) and learns Gaelic as an adult, but writes in English. The great majority of his poems are divided between two locations, his native city – seldom referred to by name – and the Scottish Highlands, with whose landscapes he has what he describes as a love affair in “A Man in Assynt” (Collected Poems2 224). Critics have noted in his mature writing a particularly distinctive voice – “the individual MacCaig cadence of almost every line” (MacLeod 30) – of which a proto- 1 “[H]is sense of mischief and conviviality recalled a fraternal Edinburgh literary life that harks back to the era of Ferguson and Burkes” (R. Crawford 614) 2 Hereafter, the Collected Poems will be abbreviated in CP when citing a poem. 7 form can already be made out in his two early volumes. These, which MacCaig would later entirely disavow, constitute an early surrealist output which, by MacCaig’s own admission, has yet to develop the clarity of his later works. Despite the success of his mature collections, critical works about Norman MacCaig going beyond the simple review are relatively scarce. The appear to belong to three different periods: that of his contemporaries, a renewal in the early 1990s, prompted by the publication of the Collected Poems (constituted mostly of Degott- Reinhardt-Reinhardt’s study – in German, which makes it unwieldy for English- speaking scholars – and the Critical Essays whose analyses do not always reach sufficient depths to be useful sources) and finally a few articles in the early 2000s divided between D. Delmaire, A. Riach and M. Fazzini. I will first discuss these critical responses to MacCaig’s works in order to better situate his poems with regards to the Scottish and wider English-speaking poetic traditions. Following this critical review, I will offer a preliminary overview of MacCaig’s poetic subject and writing persona. At this point, these two discussions will provide sufficient context for me to introduce the aims of this study and summarise the steps it will follow. A - Situating MacCaig – influences, affinities and critical context Criticism on MacCaig’s writing tends to concentrate on specific issues rather than seeking to give a unified account of his body of works.