NATIONAL LIFE STORIES
ARTISTS’ LIVES
Ian Hamilton Finlay Interviewed by Cathy Courtney
C466/014
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THE NATIONAL LIFE STORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEW SUMMARY SHEET
Ref. No.: C466/14 Playback No.: F3724-F3731
Collection title: Artists’ Lives
Interviewee’s surname: Hamilton Finlay Title: Mr
Interviewee’s forenames: Ian Sex: Male
Occupation: Date of birth:
Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation:
Date(s) of recording: 06.11.1993; 07.11.1993; 16.09.1997; 17.09.1997
Location of interview: Stonypath
Name of interviewer: Cathy Courtney
Type of recorder: Marantz CP430
Total no. of tapes: 8 Type of tape:
Mono or stereo: Stereo Speed: N/A
Noise reduction: Dolby B Original or copy: Original
Additional material:
Copyright/Clearance: The following sections are closed for 50 years until July 2066: Track 13 [0:10:47 until 0:29:47] and Track 14 [0:00:00 until 0:13:09] © The British Library
Interviewer’s comments:
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 1: Tape 1: Side A Page 1 Track 1: Tape 1: Side A
Interview with Ian Hamilton Finlay on the 6th of November 1993.
Have you done any work this morning?
Yes, I have. [break in recording]
One of the things I thought we ought to start off by saying is that, to talk about the fact that you are suspicious of autobiography, let alone biography.
Yes, and for some time, you know, you’re often asked when you...exhibitions, or take part in exhibitions, to compose little, they call them biographies but they’re autobiographies, and I usually put at the beginning, ‘Born in Nassau, Bahamas, or in Rousay, Orkney,’ because it instantly establishes that nothing in this world’s very very certain, and also something else, that, I was in fact born in Nassau, but this seems quite inappropriate, and fictional, and if you wanted...I mean if you wanted to get an idea of me from reading the thing, it would be much better to believe that I was born in Orkney than in the Bahamas.
Because that’s nearer to where your blood is?
No, just as a person. I mean I really am nothing to do with the Bahamas. I mean, everybody is very surprised if I say I was born in the Bahamas, whereas nobody would really be surprised if I said I was born in Orkney, except the ones who know I was born in the Bahamas! But anyway, this thing about putting, I was born in this place or that place, it’s really never been queried by anywhere, like...nobody has said, ‘But surely you know where you were born.’ which I would have thought would have been the automatic response, but not so. So I as far as possible go on doing it, except very special occasions where I feel I need to be very very serious, or whatever. But the point is a quite serious one, that you could recount your life as a series of facts, but it’s very possible that these facts would not really give a clear picture of you at all, because in the first place large parts of your life are imposed on you by chance or necessity, and only small parts of your life strike you, oneself, as being, in the phrase of this time, authentic; perhaps only moments are authentic. So that any time that I have had to, as it were, retell the events of my life, I’ve always felt awful afterwards, but I’ve also felt that this doesn't give a true picture of myself at all. And any true, in quotes, ‘picture of yourself’ would really have to be entirely fictional, it would have Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 1: Tape 1: Side A Page 2 to be created to make a certain impression or whatever, which the real facts of one’s life wouldn’t do, I think. And, of course when people write about your work, or your life, no, your work really, that’s fictional too, because they don’t really take account of the actual problems which you face. I mean they treat your work as a kind of logical development, whereas what you do or don’t do is also dependent on having or not having money, the difficulties of one’s circumstance, and so on and so on. I mean for instance at this moment I really can’t start new works because I haven’t any money. I mean I never have money, but I usually, or often, have some overdraft leeway, and that’s what I sort of work on, but at the moment I’m at the end of it so I can’t really do anything. And nobody’s going to, you know, in their next review of my work, going to say, ‘During this period he didn’t do anything because he hadn’t any money.’ I mean if they notice at all that I didn’t start anything, they would ascribe it to some quite other sort of reason, tiredness or whatever, whatever, or whatever. So, I mean the things that really, well not entirely but to a large extent, govern what you do, are often quite extraneous things, and when I read articles about my work, even if I like them, I feel that they really are fictional, or are to be taken...a sort of pile of constructions or something like that, not certainly as really to do with me. And then of course, because people like to simplify everything and categorise everything, there are certain myths grow up and are repeated again and again. I mean, because it’s known that I collaborate with craftsmen, it’s often said that I just have ideas, and that other people carry them out, and the sort of suggestion is that I just have like an idea, a little thought or whatever and I pass it over to somebody. But this is really not the case. And the same with the garden, that people often say that I had the kind of idea for the garden but other people have made the garden, but in fact I made the garden with my hands, you know. And as regards working with the craftsmen, I give very detailed...I mean I...when I...I usually work by letter, and I would set out the idea of the work, a clear description of the work, and the idea of the work, but I would always go on and say that this will be interpreted in material terms in such and such a way, and I set out very definitely how it should be done, allowing them to demur if they wish and say no, it will be better to do it that way. But I would feel it quite unfair to expect somebody, a craftsman, to work from the words and not from a very clear description of the material means involved. But, as I say, people always want to simplify, and because it’s known that I think or whatever, it’s assumed that the thing would be in two parts, but I myself translate the thought into its material terms. And of course if I’m working with people who I’m used to, I know how they work, so that that thought would probably be at the beginning of the work, that I would devise the work specifically for a particular person for their possibilities and for their limitations as well. And I suppose since I don’t have ideal collaborators, in a Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 1: Tape 1: Side A Page 3 sense my ideal works don’t exist, something like that. I mean, that if I had other collaborators I could do very different things I would think. OK, you ask a question now.
Do you expect to be understood?
Well, in one sense I expect to be misunderstood, but I think that the question has to be sort of translated or re-paraphrased and that is that, I don’t work with any particular audience in mind, but I certainly don’t work for my own gratification, and what I work for I suppose is some implicit rather than explicit idea of what a reasonably intelligent, perceptive person could be expected to understand; but not just a person of this moment, but over a certain length of time. I would deplore work which was personally esoteric – well I wouldn’t deplore it, I just wouldn’t be interested in it. But of course I realise that all times have limitations, and almost all times regard themselves as being immune from limitations. And I know that certain things that I do won’t be understood, or will be misconstrued, or whatever, but I don’t work in terms of the taboos, or whatever, of the instant, of a particular moment.
But I was thinking, even before somebody responds to your work, just when you were talking about collaborating with somebody, I mean communication seems to me incredibly difficult.
All communication?
Even over the simplest things. You can’t take anything as read, because the moment you do you find something fundamental has been misunderstood, and things have gone wrong. I mean, when you are collaborating on a piece of work, do you also draw it, or are you relying on language? How do you actually communicate it?
Wee scribbly drawings, if I thought them necessary, I quite often would do that, but purely to convey my intention to somebody, yes. But, I mean communication of particular things or specific things or whatever should not be too difficult.
And how often does the idea get changed by the other person without them realising it?
Well very rarely I would think. I mean, of course you are assuming that the idea is completely embodied in the work. I mean, you’re imagining that the work, if it Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 1: Tape 1: Side A Page 4 doesn’t have my idea, would have some other idea, whatever, but it’s much more likely that the work would just be wrong or be a mess or something, would be destroyed. But on the other hand all works are provisional and I wouldn’t mind...there’s not any work of mine I think which I wouldn’t mind re-doing. I mean works from...I mean at the moment I’m preparing for the printer a poem which I started I think in 1967, and, well I never did it, brought it as far as getting printed, but I’m going to do that now. And, it doesn’t really worry me that I started in 1967 and this is, whatever , 1993.
And how did you come to take it up again?
Oh, because the feeling of the work would remain in me, and sometimes that feeling is accessible to me and other times not accessible. I mean a lot of...things come and go in you, and if you can’t manage them at one time you can perhaps manage them at another. It’s like you have a kind of range of feeling possibilities inside you which alternate, and when one is sort of present that’s a possibility of trying to actualise it, and then other times it would go away completely. But I’ve returned to this poem I suppose many times in the interval and not seen just how to do it, or not managed to do it, or not had the money to do it, or whatever, whatever. But now I feel I can get it ready for the printer.
Which poem is it?
Well I’m not going to tell you that! (laughs)
And is there much material that you’ve got from the past that you might [inaudible]?
Yes, there’s lots of material. And of course there’s a lot of things which I really would like to actualise as art which I’ll never be able to because I don’t know how to do it. I mean I can only actualise what I have the form for, and I’ve had many experiences or vivid impressions or whatever whatever, that I’ve never put into art, and that I just don’t know how to do. If I had the form I could do it. And I sometimes think that the most...the things that are most essential to me I’ve never managed to actualise at all. And then, if I do eventually manage to actualise something, it’s very nice, you can tick that off as it were! (laughs)
One of the things that I find very exciting about your work is the fact that it has built up, or certainly seems from the outside, into this extraordinary unity, and yet it’s Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 1: Tape 1: Side A Page 5 encompassing such an enormous amount of quite diverse things. I mean, for example, one of the pieces that I thought was very exciting was the Monument to the Drummer Boy.
Bara.
Because, it’s a superb piece in itself, but it totally fits in with the whole of your work.
Yes. It’s funny, I was thinking of that piece this morning, I think it’s a very very good piece, and...yes, I think...is it in Brussels or somewhere like that, I think.
I’ve only seen it in a photograph.
Yes. I think some museum in Belgium bought it. Yes, I was thinking about...I think it’s a really very very good work, and it’s so sort of succinct, and it sums up so much, or includes so much. And I suppose I was thinking it would be nice if I could do more works like that; I mean you can’t repeat that work, but more works which were so absolutely final or something in themselves. I mean, I suppose that’s one work which I really wouldn’t want to do again, because it is exactly as it ought to be. I can’t imagine it being bettered. And the particular collaborator I did it with, his lettering is really not as good as some other collaborators’ lettering, but on this occasion his lettering was really perfect, really perfect. And I was also reflecting how it was that he came to do the lettering so well in this instance. No it’s a really super work, yes.
But it must be...I mean it’s the absolute rightness of it in every sense.
Yes.
But is that partly what you’re saying when you're talking about not having the form to do some of the other things, that it’s an extraordinary coming together of all those forces.
Well, I think it’s always good to give specific examples of things, and let’s say, many many years ago, in one of my other lives so to speak, I lived in a little cottage which was quite far up, well I suppose a hillside but it’s more like a mountainside because it was very sort of rugged, and to get to this little house by road, which, if you wanted to get coal or anything up you had to go by the road not by the path, and the road was Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 1: Tape 1: Side A Page 6 very steep, and on either side were forests of pine or whatever, evergreen anyway, and the road itself was like a dried up river bed, it was composed of quite large stones. And at the top was more distant hills like mountains, and that was the west, so if you went up the road in the evening there might be a great sunset pouring down the road. And this made...it was very very vivid to me, but it was like a sensation which composed...no, which contained a kind of content, but what the content is you could never say, but it was something very, something or other, like the sunset pouring down this road, which was like water down a river bed or something, with these dark trees on either side. And, I was really haunted by this sort of impression, but I’ve never been able to think how to put it into a work in any way, because I haven’t got a form for doing it. And, I suppose there’s other things like that. So for instance...another thing I’m thinking of is, when I left that world to go to another world so to speak, and I had a little...I lived alone, I was then living in another cottage alone, and I had a little grey kitten called Storm, and I couldn’t...I was going to the city and I couldn’t take Storm with me, and the shepherd’s wife who I knew said she would take the kitten. So I took him the night before I was leaving, and the shepherd’s wife stayed three or four miles outside the village, and there was an abandoned railway track, and it entered the village by a kind of viaduct, and I was sort of walking up the railway track in the dark night with sort of little starlight above the mountains, and the wee kitten in my jacket, and crossing this viaduct and the river, which you couldn’t see, running underneath the viaduct with this sound, throbbing sound, like a car stationary. It was really very dramatic, and sort of full of some kind of meaning, but I could never be able to...again, I wouldn't know how you could do this; I couldn't think how you could put this into a poem, or a work of prose, or a drama, or whatever, so it remains as a kind of, a very strong kind of feeling or impression or whatever, but which I will never be able to actualise. Now, why I should feel this need to respond to these things by making a work out of them, I don’t know why this is. But it’s a sort of fact that I get this feeling that I need to, as it were give something back, or...I can’t explain it.
To make an acknowledgement of some kind.
That’s it exactly, make an acknowledgement. And the fact that I can’t do it is very very frustrating to me. And I see that the things that I can manage are simply because there’s a form, I can find a form to do it in. But, there are some things I don’t find a forum.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 1: Tape 1: Side A Page 7 And, the stories of yours that I’ve read, because that’s where...because the two things you’ve just described are quite personal experiences, there’s an adult man experiencing them.
Yes.
Whereas, with a lot of the sculpture, it’s an extraordinary personal vision as a whole, but it’s normally not got your feelings there, it’s normally done through a revolutionary figure, or an observation about nature, that might be to do with boats, but it's not to do with a particular moment of seeing that boat. And in the stories which I’ve read where there is more personal presence, the ones I have read, and maybe this is because I haven’t read enough, the presence is usually a child. Have you written adult, stories where the adult is the [inaudible]?
Yes, yes. But, I mean the stories belong to a particular time in my life. I mean I wouldn’t write stories now, I wouldn’t know how to do it now really. But the fact...I mean, the central character in the story may be quite often a child, but I wouldn’t think of that child as being me, it’s only a means to express something. I mean, the thing, expressed is usually a sort of feeling or whatever. I mean some of the stones are quite Symbolist, but you wouldn’t think that reading them; I mean they’re not in the Symbolist manner, but they really are quite sort of Symbolist. And at this time I used to like reading, well especially Russian short stories and so on, but it was a whole different kind of world that I lived in then, and I had different intentions and so on from now. I mean just is the same that I couldn’t...I couldn’t write now the kind of poems that I wrote in Orkney, though I still like those poems very much, but I just could not do it, I mean it would be impossible for me to do it.
Is it to do with degrees of happiness and expectation?
To do with...?
Degrees of happiness and expectation.
(laughs) No, nothing to do with that at all. No. No, I mean... [pause] I don’t know how to talk about that really. Ask me another question. I mean it’s not a silly question, I just don’t know how to answer it.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 1: Tape 1: Side A Page 8 Do you think you are more or less fearful now than you were say when you were twenty-five?
Fearful?
Mm, or is it irrelevant?
Or tearful.
Fearful with an f. Or an s in your case.
Less so I think because you become...you become harder as you get older, I think. No?
And is that a defensive thing, or a practical thing, or...?
No, it’s not defensive. I think you just become...is it Logan Pearsall Smith I think has a quite good aphorism about it, which I can’t...I can’t remember the exact words, but the thought is like that you can throw off your moral scruples more easily in the same way that you can throw off a cold or something like this. And I thought what he said was true, I noticed it in myself, that I don’t agonise over things to the extent that I used to do, and I don’t think this is a very good thing, but it’s to do with getting older I think. I would be much more able to be ruthless now than I used to be, I think.
So it’s a kind of confidence in a way?
Yes. Your comments are really quite astute aren’t they, don’t you think?
No idea.
Yes, I think they’re quite astute, yes. Confidence, yes for me confidence in a way is the, if not the secret, the necessary ingredient of lots of things that...as regards working, I sometimes lose my confidence totally, and it’s not like losing confidence in being able to make the works, it’s just like losing confidence. Like a kind of thing that surrounds you, that makes everything possible or something like this. Belief, or faith, faith maybe is what it is. And, when I maybe make a poem or a proposal or something ready for the printer, sometimes I just can’t do it, and it’s not invariably because the work is not right or something, it’s just because I don’t have the Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 1: Tape 1: Side A Page 9 confidence, or the energy is another way of putting it, a feeling of energy, and when you have that, you can stride over things in some kind of way and achieve them. And when I don’t have it, I'm completely lost. And it would be very hard to say why it comes and goes. There doesn’t often seem any external reason for it. But it certainly is...it’s a very great help to working, to have it. And for me it’s sort of crucial, but it’s difficult to talk about because it’s a mystery. I mean it’s not like that I feel today I could write a sonnet or something, it’s not like a specific thing; it’s like that, you have this thing in you, or you don’t have it, and...I mean it’s the same with, when people come to see you or whatever, sometimes you feel very confident and other times you don’t; sometimes you could speak and sometimes you couldn’t; sometimes I can write letters very readily, sometimes I can’t manage three lines. And what is this? It’s not the facility, the faculty, that’s gone; it’s the thing of confidence, yes. But, it’s just a mystery, and I suppose that religious...it’s a sort of form of the thing that religious people go on about isn’t it, dryness they call it, what mystics sometimes suffer from. Dark nights of the soul, whatever, this kind of.....
[End of Track 1: Tape 1: Side A] Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 2: Tape 1: Side B Page 10 Track 2: Tape 1: Side B
Another question.
Well, can we just...I think I missed that you were just saying that you didn’t think it could be talked about...
Yes, well it’s difficult to speak about, because there’s not really anything useful to say. I mean it’s just like, sometimes you have it and sometimes you don’t have it.
Do you get any warning that it’s going to happen? Is it very sudden?
Yes, it’s sudden; I mean, I’m really quite volatile. I, I can be one day totally bereft and another day feeling very confident. I mean it’s not something that goes on for long periods usually, but it could be from hour to hour, almost, or certainly from day to day. But when you have the confidence you can...you can just do the thing. And of course sometimes it’s not right, but I mean, other times it could be right but you can’t do it, because you haven’t got the confidence; it’s not the faculty that’s at stake.
And how much work do you find you've done subconsciously? How much are you conscious of an idea developing, or do you suddenly find you’ve really got it fairly fully formed?
Well I tend to find...I find working very difficult, exhausting really, because...well especially writing I find very very tiring, I have great difficulty in doing it, and I don’t have an easy relationship with language at all. And, I mean people, you often see when people use a lot of words in a very, whatever sort of way, this is called having a talent for language or something, but it seems to me maybe this is the very opposite of having a talent for language, that these people have got no talent for it, precisely because they’re so at home with it. And the writers I like are the ones who don’t have that easy relationship with language, which I think is essentially journalistic. I mean I’m haunted by...well this thing like the...the words must be, that they couldn’t be other than they are, but with prose almost always they could be other than they are, so how do you know when it's right? I mean in the case of my stories which I told, I write for a long long time now, but I used to write each story twenty-five or thirty times, so I would know it almost off by heart, and start from the very beginning again each time. And I really find language a kind of torture, but that’s me, and there’s nothing I can do about it, I just accept that, and I see that other people are not like Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 2: Tape 1: Side B Page 11 that, and good luck to them, so to speak. But, there's this thing about...well say, if you take anagrams, which I like, that I like the anagrams made from short names, because then I feel that I haven't composed the anagram, I’ve only revealed it. Because this is an illusion, because with almost all names you could get other anagrams, but the shorter the name the more limited the number of anagrams possible and so the more I like it, because the ones I like, I feel that I haven’t invented this, I haven’t made it, I’ve only uncovered it, it was there all the time. And therefore it’s got this thing of necessity, and this is what I like, that there's no...it’s not me, it’s something...pre- existing or whatever, that I’ve discovered.
But in a way that fits in with what we were saying about the Drummer Boy, in the sense that it absolutely has to fall into place.
Yes, but the thing is that not all works can be like that; I mean this is another thing that one recognises, that that work is a kind of summation; but it's not summation because I had achieved necessarily that summation, but because there are certain things that you can do with a column drum and so on, these things are kind of limited, and that’s the glory of the work, that it couldn’t be other than it is. No, I mean it’s very clever of you to have thought of that work, because I think, maybe if I was to be remembered by one work I would be quite happy to be remembered by that one, it’s certainly one of my very favourite works.
I mean, with something like that then...
I mean I wish I could do a work like that a month, that would be happiness, but you have to realise that...I mean, there’s a chap I used to know long long long ago, who had a theory that artists were remembered only by their best work, so he did only one kind of picture a year you see, because the other fifty would have been not his best work and therefore not whatever, but unfortunately he’s not remembered at all! (laughs)
Obviously none of them were his best works.
I suppose this is it. But I mean, it’s folly to think that everything can be you.
But with the Drummer Boy one, did you just suddenly know that work was there? I mean how did you...how did you not see it before almost, because it’s so perfect?
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 2: Tape 1: Side B Page 12 Yes, but I mean, it’s so perfect really because, partly because the collaborator rose to the occasion, and you know, didn’t say well, it’s really going to be quite heavy in this size. I mean, he did it properly, he did it all properly. But there’s nothing in it of course which is not what any mason should be able to do; I mean it’s only like a classical...
But the idea of it, I mean...you had known the story?
Yes.
For how long?
Oh I don’t know, a year, something like that, at that stage, possibly.
And so, it was sort of latent?
Yes, I mean that...there's a number of elements in it which are brought together in a kind of perfect way, and...I mean it's at once very simple and very resonant. I mean you could say...oh well, I don’t know if you could...yes you could, you could say that columns of this [inaudible], or drums of this [inaudible] and so on, but you couldn’t...you couldn’t have it that all your works were like that, it’s not possible. I mean there’s a lot of other works to do with Bara which I also like. I mean that set of works about Bara which the museum in Vienna bought.
Which are they?
Well there’s the...there’s a whole set. There’s a tower of toy drums.
Oh, is to do with the drawing where the tower is different, there’s a tower drawn underneath that’s perpendicular and a tower that’s curvy? Is that something else?
No, that’s another work. That’s been realised in stone now in my work in Munich, in my exhibition in Munich that’s just opening. No, this was...the name, Bara is sometimes...there’s this other little drummer boy, Viala, and there’s a kind of thing about them that, some believe in the theory that there was only one drummer boy and he was sometimes called Bara and then sometimes Viala. There’s a kind of like myth getting conflated. And then sometimes, in David’s scenario for the recognition of them, there’s two of them, Viala and Bara. But I read a thing in a book called Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 2: Tape 1: Side B Page 13 Transformations in which somebody had said that they are really the same. Anyway, it happens that Viala, the name, unlike Bara, you’ve got the V, the I, the A, which is like the V upside down, the L and A, they’re all like rendered very simple straight lines. I mean the echo, this shape which you see on the side of drums, especially if they’re drawn by children, or whatever. So, I did this on the side of the toy drum, and just made them into a column of toy drums. It’s very effective. And then, I had in the same set there’s a rocking horse, a real rocking horse, which has got a sort of saddle with his initials on it.
And that's because he was so young, is it?
Yes, because he really was a child, he was twelve or something like this. And then, there was two little plinths, wooden plinths, with slightly, can’t pronounce, trompe- l’oeil is it? I can’t pronounce it but you know what I mean. Flutings painted on them, and then two little toy drums stood on them, but toy drums which had not metal but that sort of skin stuff that’s on real drums. And on those are copies of David’s, the head of David’s dying Bara, and they stand up on these. And then...there was another stone drum with both Viala and Bara’s name and dates on it. And then, there was an inscription on the wall with this same sort of theme of this shape that you see on the drum, and then Viala’s name and then this shape again. I think there was something else as well, but I can’t remember what it was. Anyway, it’s a sort of group to do with Bara and Viala.
And were there other works that would have been in that series but were rejected because you didn’t think they worked?
No, I don’t consider the series is over. I mean...I would like to do more about these wee boys. And, oddly enough, a friend phoned me up this week and said, there was an article in the Scotsman a few days ago about my problems with the Region and the Garden Temple, and she was going to write a letter in, and she was going to draw...this article said about how our society has dispensed with metaphysics, and that she wanted to write this letter which...I don’t suppose she sent it, because she was very aware that if she sent it people wouldn’t understand it. And I said, well that’s not any reason to [ph] send it, as long as it’s rational, but I think, maybe she would send it but I think she probably was too timid in the end. Anyway, what it said was drawing...it was really a bit like Thought For Today on the radio, it was drawing an analogy between the Liverpool boy who had been murdered and the fate of Bara, and how the one had died for an ideal, and the other hadn’t, and the one belonged to a Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 2: Tape 1: Side B Page 14 society which had a kind of ideal, and the other belonged to our society. It was a really nice letter and I was really very touched that she had thought about the Bara work, and related it to this poor wee dead boy in Liverpool. But, of course as I say, that...she told me she didn't know if she would send it or not, and that if she did send it everybody would criticise her because they wouldn’t understand it. And I said, ‘Well that’s not a reason not to send it; you have to be brave and send it, not think whether people will understand it or not. The point is whether it’s legitimate or not. And since it clearly is legitimate, then you should send it.’ But, there’s two letters in the Scotsman today, but it’s not one of them, so I think perhaps she didn’t send it.
It’s a pity, because it could encourage people to make a very valuable connection.
Well this is the point, that...I suppose that I feel that my capacity in working is one of making connections which people don’t usually make, that’s the thing that I can do. But it’s not only making connections, it’s making them in a lyrical way, of what I call lyrical, bringing together disparate things in a way which is not fanciful, not surrealist, not merely to entertain, but because you can make actual valid connections. And this of course, I mean my friend was right in perceiving that the analogy would annoy people, not only because they wouldn't know who Bara was, but because they would find it somehow improper to relate things in this way as if they are real. And I think this is one of the reasons that my work annoys people, because I bring things together which are supposed to be separate, and...I don’t know, I mean I don’t know why I have that innate desire to do this. I mean I do it quite naturally, I mean it’s not anything to do with an audience or something, I mean I do it for myself. But I feel that it’s something that’s not recognised, the two things that I have a capacity for I think are simply not recognised. One is this thing for bringing things together, and the other is for composing. I mean, people on the whole write very appreciatively about the garden, my garden, and speak about it very appreciatively when they’re here, I mean more so than any other part of my work; but they almost never sort of say, or see, that, I think the thing that I can do in the garden which other people don’t find it so easy to do is simply to compose, like to take different elements, like stone or sculpture, inscriptions, plants, trees, whatever, and bring them together in a way that really works. And nobody has ever mentioned my capacity for doing this, and it really surprises me, because it’s the thing that I can do. I mean I think it’s one of the things that I can do better than most other people. But, I mean there’s no article on me anywhere that ever mentions this, you know. And the same with this thing about bringing disparate things together. But I see that to bring disparate things together does annoy people, because...what is it, it seems unsafe to them, that things have to be Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 2: Tape 1: Side B Page 15 kept apart, and... Well maybe in my case it is to do with confidence, that I...when I have the confidence I do things which alarm other people, and can alarm me too when I think of them afterwards, you know! (laughs)
About what?
Well, I mean...I suppose what it is is like carrying things to their logical conclusion instead of stopping short like most people do. And I suppose for instance the Battle with the Region, and especially the day the sheriff officer came, and...I mean up to this point nobody had believed that you could stand up to Strathclyde Region, because it’s so powerful and people are so frightened of it. And also the warrant sale as a form had been so frightening to people, it was like the equivalent of the bomb or something, that if the Region did it to you that was it. And I was convinced that one could stand up to this. But really nobody believed me beforehand, but I believed it beforehand. But I remember Stephen Bann for instance was very worried and urged me please not to do this thing and so on. But, it seemed to me that since things existed called ‘events’ or ‘happenings’, and no one had defined what their limits were, that you could use this, because it was in the air so to speak. I mean it was the same as when we made the robbery on the SAC, and when they brought in the police, and we said, ‘But it’s a happening’ or something like this. (laughing) And they were totally nonplussed, because they...well they phoned the ACGB to ask what to do, because they saw that, it would look very silly in a police court if they hadn’t recognised a happening when they saw one, when they were supposed to be an arts council! But the fact is that nobody had really seen...I mean, I would never be in any book about happenings and so on, but I think some of my happenings have been amongst the best, because they didn’t observe the limits of the form, and my happenings were able to include real police and things like this you see, which seemed to me to be quite good. But, after I had done it then everybody who was there believed in it, but before I had done it, nobody believed you could do this, that you could bring together World War II, the sheriff officer, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And I mean, as far as I was concerned the ultimate triumph of that was when the Region refused to return the stolen works which belonged to the Wordsworth Athenaeum in America, and the Wordsworth Athenaeum brought in the US State Department and there was a confrontation between Strathclyde Region and the United States of America. (laughs) I really felt quite triumphant about that. But the sad thing of course is that people don’t always see the wonder of these things.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 2: Tape 1: Side B Page 16 But it’s perfect in the sense that, for example the work about the French Revolution is also, it’s real events, I mean it’s going forward and backwards.
Yes, I mean the events are...yes, I mean, are very fascinating. And the exhibition that’s about to open in Munich now, the Lenbachhaus where the exhibition is, out of the windows you can see the plinths of what were the Ehrentempels, but you won’t know about these. Well, it’s...the Putsch, the Nazi thing, it was in 1923 I think it was, when...was it...sixteen people in the march were killed, and when Hitler came to power he got the architect Troost to design these two temples, twin temples in the Konigsplatz in Munich, and in the temples they put...there was eight coffins in each in which were the bodies of the Nazi martyrs, and these became, these temples were like religious places or shrines, and they were constantly, I suppose SS guards, or guards anyway. And they’re very nice little temples which, Troost actually based the design on, I can’t remember the architect’s name but an Italian renaissance architect, and... Anyway there they were, and at the end of the war, at the time of the de-Nazification tribunals, the Americans removed the bronze, the very elaborate bronze coffins, and blew up the temples, punitively or ideologically or whatever. But quite inexplicably they left the plinths which are of ashlar stone, and I suppose about ten or eleven feet high. And inside it was stepped down, and at the bottom was where the coffins were, and they were under an open roof. Anyway the plinths remained, and over the years trees seeded themselves into the plinths, and wild flowers, and the effect is quite kind of extraordinary, like Casper David Friedrich or something, and all these wild flowers. Well they had, I don’t know, two or three years ago they had a competition for the redesigning of the Konigsplatz, and I suppose the idea was that they would take away the plinths and replace them with some other buildings. And various architects made proposals, but none of the proposals in the end were accepted by the city, but there was a big public debate as to what should happen. And meanwhile the city had made official survey of the wild flowers which were growing, and, I forget exactly how many there are, but I’ve got thirty in I think, but an awful lot of wild flowers. And in the controversy, there were various attitudes, there were the people who wanted the plinths left as a kind of warning, and the people who wanted the plinths taken away, so that, you know...and the Green Party, which wanted the plinths kept because of the wild flowers you see. And to me this is kind of quite amazing, that the thing goes through, that begins as a Nazi shrine and it ends up as a Green Party shrine because of the wild flowers. I mean, it’s quite wonderful as a drama created by history. And so many people don’t notice these things. I have a friend there, Ava, and she had never noticed the plinths or thought about them at all, because she's just a young art student, and I told her about what happened, so then she actually Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 2: Tape 1: Side B Page 17 went in, up the steps which are still there and down inside, and she told me that in the middle, under the open roof where the coffins had been, a tramp had built a hut and was living. I mean this is like Piranesi or something; I mean it’s all to me so exciting. So I made this in my exhibition, two models of the Ehrentempels restored. And in one, where the bronze coffins were...the temple is restored exactly as it was, immaculate, but without the bronze coffins, and the simple bronze plaques, and on these are engraved all the names of the wild flowers which were removed in order to restore the temple, so the wild flowers become the new fallen, and it becomes again a sacred site, but with a new vision, you see. And in the other one, the step down here, I turn into...I line it with black marble so it becomes a pool, and through the open roof which is restored the clouds reflect themselves in the water, and there’s an inscription which is from the Roman writer Varro, ‘Aeterna Templa Caeli’[ph], the eternal temples of the sky. Well of course Varro doesn’t mean the clouds, he means like...for the Romans any area of the sky which was demarcated, as this would be by the roof, became, it was called a temple, and was sacred to the purposes of divination. But here with the pool you would see the clouds, so it would have this other meaning, that the eternal temples of the sky. But of course the thing about the clouds is, first that they are emblems, both of the eternal and of the totally ephemeral, these double things, so it becomes a kind of comment on the thousand-year Reich, which lasted only eleven years or whatever, or on the transitoriness of all regimes. And in the other.....
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In the other, Hitler had this famous saying, which would be in English, ‘the word of stone’, or like...the Reich architecture was to be used to embody the ideology of the regime, but in the end, the word of stone was a little wild flower that grew, so, I made this text that says, ‘Das Wort Auf Stein wild flower,’ and I made a little vase which is like the...modelled on the columns of the Ehrentempels, and the bases, and then the wee little wild flowers, and it says ‘Das Wort Auf Stein wild flower.’ So, it’s like...it’s actualising, or bringing out, this great drama which had taken place unnoticed. Yes really unnoticed, because nobody had sort of seen that, how events had transformed the nature of the building, and to me this is very very exciting. And because I feel the same kind of excitement about the French Revolution, and these things which people see as being over, are not really over at all, they’re only waiting to be re-animated by being brought into another context, which would be the present I suppose.
So there’s really the quiet revolution of the wild flowers...
Well, I mean, it’s clear that for the Green Party and all that it stands for, that this had become another sacred site, but nobody had noticed this really, in a way, but the Greens wouldn’t see it as being a sacred site, they would only be very annoyed when there was a movement to destroy the plinths and therefore destroy the wild flowers.
But it’s also extraordinary isn’t it, when you think of Hitler trying to take over a country and take over Europe and everything else, that he’s got time to build a temple, that he doesn't just say, OK, take these coffins to this church.
Och no, but I mean you have to understand that Hitler was very very fond of architecture, and that...my dead friend, J.F. Hendry, and...I don’t know if you ever saw the watercolours at Victoria that Ian Gardener did for my never-published book about Speer’s Garden in Spandau. Did you see the watercolours?
I’ve seen them in the book.
Och yes, but you can't see them there. Anyway, in the introduction to the unpublished book, Jim said that really by the end of the war Hitler was fighting the war in order to defend a vision of architecture, and this was in many ways quite true, that he really was, you know, very very devoted to architecture. And in the Spandau garden book, Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 3: Tape 2: Side A Page 19 amongst other...that Speer sent me, I think it was eleven little photos that he had taken illicitly when the guards weren’t looking, of the garden he had made in Spandau. And originally, the prisoners had been told to garden as a sort of therapeutic activity, like, to keep them quiet, and then he saw the possibility of making a garden. And he was fascinated with this, that this man who had had the capacities of the whole of the Third Reich, was now reduced to making a little garden out of...all he had was bombed bricks, broken bricks, and no...I mean he made his...he told me he made a spirit level by using a plank with a little tin lid with water in it, and so on and so on. And this is really amazing kind of drama. And then...I called the book, The Walled Garden, or Our Walled Garden because this was an ultimate walled garden, and I used the...I divided the book into sections and each section dealt with the same garden but seen from a different viewpoint, so it became a different garden, and I used...each section was governed by a quotation from one of the letters Speer wrote me about the garden. And the plants that he had came all from two sources. One was the cemetery for allied airmen shot down over Berlin, which was really beautiful because then it became, his garden became a garden of remembrance for the dead British airmen, and American airmen. And the other source was quite as extraordinary. One of the guards was Scottish, and...I mean the soldier guards was from a Scottish regiment, and he had a brother-in-law who owned a small plant nursery is Scotland, so when he came home he used to take plants back to Speer. And of course Scotland is like Sparta or something, I mean it’s not thought of as being to do with plants but to do with rocks and everything. So there's this lovely thing about the two sources for the plants. Anyway, Speer explained to me that the garden was really secret architecture, and if you lay down in the middle of the garden then it became like Third Reich architecture, forbidden architecture, but as no guard of course ever lay down only he knew this, you know. And, this is amazing to me. And another thing that he talked to me about was that Hitler became very concerned about the fact that civilisations are remembered for the quality of their ruins, and were the Third Reich buildings going to make good enough ruins? And he gave Speer the kind of task of worrying about this and seeing to it, and Speer couldn’t really discuss it with anybody else, because to other NSDAP members you couldn’t raise the idea about the Third Reich ever being in ruins. Anyway, but in the event there was not so much Third Reich architecture really, and a lot of it was destroyed in the bombing, and what wasn’t destroyed was usually blown up by the occupying forces. But it struck me that if Speer’s garden was really secretly Third Reich architecture, then what happened to it after he was set free from Spandau, after twenty years, and... So I asked him about this, and he said, well the guards were very friendly to him, and they told him they would look after his garden. But of course, after, little by little they stopped looking after it. So I thought, Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 3: Tape 2: Side A Page 20 so here we have a genuine Third Reich ruin, and we must get photos of it, so, it happened at this time I did a sundial for the British Embassy residence in Bonn, and I said to the ambassador, could you arrange that somebody goes in to get to photograph Speer’s garden. So he said yes, he would do this. But anyway, the Russians vetoed it, that no one was allowed to do it, so, now Spandau has been flattened. But, I mean these kind of things really fascinate me, how...well there’s this thing about Speer too, that he had this sort of capacity that some people have, that, the things that he did always became kind of more than they did. For instance, one thing he sent me was a photo of a very very simple trellis that he had made out of two pieces of upright wood, and I think one bit of wood across, or maybe two bits of wood across. It was very very simple. Anyway, he wrote on the back of this that, ‘The roses were supposed to grow up my trellis.’ You know, it was so sad, it was like, this whole vision of him as being a great architect for the Third Reich, ‘the roses were supposed to grow up my trellis,’ and now there was nothing, you know. And he wouldn’t be conscious when he wrote this, but something in his personality had this capacity for transforming things. And I suppose that this is something that I really like in life, when you can transform what seems something mundane or whatever, and elicit its actual content, you know. But, I mean in the same way for instance that Strathclyde Region attacking this garden brought out the content of the garden. I mean it made Little Sparta’s ideology quite real, because it was actually being attacked by another ideology. But the sad thing is that people don't really see these dramas in a full kind of way. I mean, all through Little Spartan war, nobody really wrote about it in an exciting way; all the art critics avoided the subject, or you might say scrupulously, whereas it really was a wonderful dramatisation of the central, to me the central question of our age, is the complete secularisation of a culture. This process that began at the end of the Second World War and has gone on and on and on. And when the SAC, instead of pushing the problem away, like twice, when asked to make a clear statement about the status of the Garden Temple and the garden, a public statement, they voted to say nothing. I mean, of course this is wrong, because their charter says that they should explain the arts to government at all levels, and Strathclyde Region is clearly part of local government. So they really have no right to vote to say nothing, to remain silent, but they did, and they get away with it. But instead of this, they should have said yes, this is a really fascinating question here; under what circumstances can someone create in our culture a building which is non-secular, or...well, the whole question of piety and so on and so on, a question which was central to the French Revolution of course. So they should have said, well let’s hold an international symposium and invite the Region, and really see where the arts stand, what has happened to the arts and so on. But they perceived that the question is Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 3: Tape 2: Side A Page 21 difficult or dangerous, and they pushed it away, whereas to me it was a wonderful drama, that, now I feel discouraged because I waited so long for anybody to grasp what was actually going on. And of course, when the battle began fifteen years ago or something, nothing was so clear as it is now, but I mean now, everybody sort of begins to see that the heritage industry and the growth of tourism and so on, represent a total change in our understanding of culture, and there begins to be a kind of worry about it. And this was clear to me fifteen years ago, but nobody has related what has happened at Little Sparta to this, where here, it’s like the Bara drum, that it’s in a very pure form, because I’ve worked at it or something like that. But it only frightens people and they run way. It’s a shame, because...it’s a public art form, you know, what I see it as being, but as I say I do feel discouraged now because people have got so banal, you know. And the art criticism of the time is so banal, so determinedly so. I mean did you ever see my work called Aphrodite of the Terror?
No.
Well, it’s just...it’s something Aphrodite; it’s a famous Aphrodite which, maybe it’s in the Vatican or somewhere. Anyway, it’s an authentic antique of which you can quite readily get plaster copies. So I exhibited the plastic copy, and with just a single red thread round the neck, you know this work, and the point is of course that after the fall of the Robespierrists they had these ‘balles des victimes’, dances or balls of the victims, and those who had lost relatives to the guillotine wore a red thread round the neck. Did you see the film Danton by that Polish director, Wajda?
No I didn’t.
No. Well in that there's a very striking image where Camille, Desmoulins’ wife, stands in front of the guillotine and puts the red thread round her neck. It’s really wonderful, and... Anyway, the point was, not anything to do with the French Revolution’s Terror, but with the secular terror which is raged in our time, and Aphrodite wears this because her relatives are of course the gods who have been destroyed. And this to me is the central drama of our time.
So in a way what we’ve lost is a sense of extremity almost.
Well, yes, because...secularisation will always of course rule out the extreme of course. But it’s much more than that. I mean, it’s the loss of piety, I mean, Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 3: Tape 2: Side A Page 22 something which is so important in order to respond. I mean, I don’t know, do you know about the Saint-Just Vigilantes and the great battle with the National Trust?
Was this about the follies?
About the follies book.
Can you just tell me in more detail.
Well, these two people, Headley and this Dutch person, Meulenkamp did this utterly deplorable book called Follies, and it was originally issued as a National Trust guide, and someone brought it to my attention because there was a paragraph about this garden in it, and they were very disparaging about the garden, and they pretended that they had been here but they had never actually been here. So, anyway, having the book to read this paragraph, I then read the book, and I thought, well, the paragraph about here is not really important; what is important is the whole book, which is utterly dreadful. And the supposition of the authors was that follies could only be enjoyed as eccentricities created by mad people, and the pleasure you got out of visiting them was sneering at them or laughing at them. And this was clearly stated at the beginning of the book. And I really was quite outraged that the National Trust, which is supposed to be prolonging or defending a culture, a tradition, had issued such a book which could only destroy the whole pleasure of follies. And so I wrote to the National Trust, and they wrote back a kind of contemptuous derisive kind of letter. So I wrote back angrily then, and then it became clear that they were really dreadful people, and that they weren’t...they hadn’t even read the book I don't think. And they said things like, ‘We will publish anything as long as it makes us money,’ and so on. And they just couldn’t grasp that this book was absolutely blasphemous really in essence. And so it was necessary to do something, so we started this campaign, we got these sticker things that said, ‘Censored by the Saint-Just Vigilantes’, and wherever we could find the book we put one of the stickers on it. And, I did a whole lot of cards and...it was published jointly with Cape, and I did a copy of the lost David picture of Lepeletier lying dead with his sword above him, and on the sword there’s a note, and I changed the text on the note to say, ‘I was published by Jonathan Cape.’ (laughing) And, I managed to get one of the cards put up in Cape's noticeboard, and I sent them to all the directors and so on. Anyway, Cape went to the police, and sent a memo round all the staff saying that anyone who received one of these cards was to hand it in immediately, so it could be given to the police, and so on. And, I mean myth is a very powerful thing, which I realised long ago, and one of the London Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 3: Tape 2: Side A Page 23 papers published a bit about Saint-Just Vigilantes terrorising London, and stomping around and knocking people off the pavements, and all this kind of thing.
With pikes no doubt.
Yes! (laughing) This is the sort of thing. And anyway, but...then, a person that I knew then who lived in Colchester, he was very annoyed because the oldest Norman keep or something, which is in Colchester, had actually been presented in the book as a folly, and [inaudible-laughing] Norman keep. Anyway, he...some National Trust lecture took place in Colchester and he picketed it and handed out leaflets against the follies book, and so the local paper then of course took it up, and they got in touch with the publicity department in the National Trust, and the National Trust, in order to silence the paper, said that this person who had handed out the leaflets was a friend of Ian Hamilton Finlay, who was a notorious Nazi, and gave this person the impression that Little Sparta was kind of the last redoubt, the redoubt of the NSDAP. And the reporter then told this person I knew there that the story was too big for him, he couldn't touch it! (laughing) Anyway, and so and so on. And then the Dutch man wrote this really terrible piece about me in a Dutch magazine, which...oh I can't tell you how serious, this dreadful piece, which accused me of being Nazi and all this kind of thing, and...I never read such a vituperative ghastly piece in my life. Anyway, it was taken up by one of the big newspapers, and I had to defend myself, and it cost me a thousand pounds to get a...the paper wouldn’t allow me to reply. And they have this thing called right of reply, which is really not a right of reply at all, but if you get a lawyer, and a lawyer argues with the paper, then you can get to reply, but this cost me a thousand pounds. Anyway, these people have pursued this vendetta against me ever since. But the point is that after a certain time the National Trust must have read the book I think finally, and they agreed that they would take their name off any future edition, so the next edition was done by Cape.
So they still brought it out again?
Cape brought it out again, yes.
In the same form, nothing else changed?
No, I don’t think anything was changed. I think they took out the bit about Little Sparta. But I had never argued about Little Sparta; I pointed out to the people who had pretended to be here when they had never been here, that this really was nothing Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 3: Tape 2: Side A Page 24 compared to the other things they wrote. I mean, they put for instance, the Wallace Monument in Scotland in as a folly, but it’s one of Scotland’s great national monuments. They put in Stourhead as a folly. I mean they put in half the great English gardens, and they began by saying that follies are like people who put leopard-skin coverings on the steering wheels of their cars or whatever. I mean, really quite extraordinary. And their rudeness to the architects, and to everybody they met, I mean it was really like, this time at its very very worst you know. But, what didn’t occur to the authors was that you could get pleasure out of the follies, not only by sniggering at them but by being touched by them or moved by them or seeing some of them as being beautiful. I mean, that lady Barbara or somebody who's dead now, wrote a very nice book about the follies that came out long before their book, which is a very nice, civilised kind of book, and sees that follies are not only things to be sneered at and you can get pleasure from adopting, I don’t know what you would say, but not excluding piety from your attitude.
It’s also extraordinary to bother to write a book about something, purely to denigrate it.
Well they formed a whole society as well these people, which has members and things, and I suppose they go around denigrating every folly they can find. But it’s just so sort of typical of our time that it supposes that this is the only pleasure you can get out of things. I mean look at for instance someone like William Feaver’s art criticism, I mean, if he ever comes up against anything that has any spiritual aspect or aspiration, he gets absolutely outraged and attacks it like anything. I mean, this is kind of hatred of the spirit, and the secular terror is not a figment of my imagination, it’s a very very real thing, that wherever the spirit appears now it has to be crushed completely.
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And presumably, that fear of the spirit is totally linked to the way everybody treats one another as well.
Yes, I mean that’s blamed on Mrs Thatcher, but I mean, it’s clearly not just that. No, I mean...the trouble, a trouble is that ages, times, epochs, whatever you like to say, seldom understand themselves; they’re only really understood in retrospect. But it seems to me that our time is almost unique in its refusal to have any kind of public discussion about its own nature, that it keeps having...well, as we were saying...when I was in Germany at the end of the war, all the lassies that I met used to say to me very seriously, ‘Oh, if only you had been here in the Hitler time, how happy it was,’ you know! (laughing) And clearly this is a case of a decade not entirely understanding itself. And the same is true of our time, and I mean, one wonders what, in twenty or thirty years’ time, will be thought about this time. But one thing is clear, that our age is determined to fight, or re-fight, the old battles instead of looking at its own battles. I mean there’s a great...well for instance, the Anti-Nazi League is a good example of this, I don’t know if you know about this League, but they have it up here too, and every time the Anti-Nazi League has a demonstration, they’re really the most violent, destructive demonstrations they have anywhere in Britain, you know. And this is kind of not noticed or something. But, I mean, the idea of having an Anti-Nazi League in Scotland is really just absurd because there’s no Nazism in Scotland. I mean there’s lots of other things that should be worried about. But it’s very cosy to have the righteousness that belongs to this kind of cause and then go and smash up people’s cars and things, things like this. But, this is sort of...I mean what’s happened in our time is that the vocabulary of liberalism has been taken over by non-liberal, illiberal people, and is used not for idealistic ends but in a purely destructive manner. And of course this...people see these things only in bits, and it’s now like, there's now this great thing about, you know, it’s beginning to dawn on people about the way that political correctness is actually functioning in America as a kind of very destructive, annihilistic thing. But of course it’s also here, and all this is part of a refusal to...to look at our own time and see what the problems actually are, and if you try and...if you try and actually discuss these things in public, you’re ostracised. I mean, there’s no...I mean there’s no serious...if you go back to...if you think about the Twenties now, when people like Shaw and Chesterton would give speeches in the Albert Hall or wherever, I don’t know where they gave speeches, and there was this great public debate about the nature of the time. But in our time there’s no such public debate at all, and I mean the only magazine that I ever see that has urgent debates in it, apart Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 4: Tape 2: Side B Page 26 from Aero Modeller and such, is A.D., Architectural...what is it, Design? A.D. You know the magazine published by that big Greek that Charles Jenks writes in.
Oh I think I know what you mean, yes.
You know. In there. They are very kind of heated kind of things, the kind of thing that you used to get in the New Statesman and places like that, but now you don’t; everything’s become absolutely...I don’t know what it is, that...it’s like a complete censorship, and everybody’s frightened to speak.
Or is it that they have just become too bland.
Well this blandness is to do with...I mean why are they bland? Because if you’re not bland you’re punished. I mean, this thing, going back to William Feaver, I mean he hates anything that’s not bland, and he really hates it, and this is...this is the thing of our time, which when people look back they will see, but they can't see it now.
So do you think there might be a sort of underground piety?
That there might be? You mean that there is that we don’t know about?
Not necessarily as any group thing, but privately for people, there must be surely.
I don’t know, I mean... I think secularisation has reached such an extreme stage that people don’t realise what has been lost, and they only glimpse in a very shallow way in particulars, like, as I say like they now begin to see that the heritage industry is not maybe a very good thing, and so on and so on.
So it’s a lost capacity?
Yes, exactly, a lost capacity. You’re a very intelligent person.
[break in recording]
[end of session]
Interview with Ian Hamilton Finlay at Stonypath on the 7th of November 1993.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 4: Tape 2: Side B Page 27 A dim question I wanted to ask you was, in the piece about clay and plaster and marble, to do with clay for the living and plaster for the dead, I’m not sure I understand why marble is for the revolution. Is it because of its staying power?
No, because of its Neoclassical credentials so to speak. And also of course it’s very hard. But it’s the hypothetically perfect, Neoclassical material. I mean not that I would do many works in marble, but just theoretically or hypothetically or poetically or lyrically or whatever, you can think of it as being identified with Neoclassicism. Oh, it wasn’t such a dim question really.
[break in recording]
.....I would quite like to follow through is, there does seem to me this extraordinary unity in the work, from very early days till now, and I wondered really at what stage things had joined in. When you first started making the poetry books and publishing, did you see, did you have any intimation that it would become part of a sort of huge structure of work?
No, not at all, because everything has always been so desperate in different ways. But certainly there’s usually been a total lack of necessary money, so you can’t have sort of thoughts about huge structures of what you’re going to do in the future or whatever, because you’re just desperately trying to survive and do something in the present. You know, it always disconcerts me when people write about my life as if it was some kind of logical unfolding; I mean it’s never really been like that at all. I mean it doesn’t surprise me that there would be a unity, because one's interests are the source of what one does, and there’s obviously some kind of unity in one’s interests. I mean...I mean people quite often kind of remark on the unity and the disparity of...the unit of the whole and the disparity of the parts or something, but I don’t find it remarkable, I would find it remarkable if it was otherwise.
And when you first started to publish, it was with...is it the Tamarisk Press?
No, Tarasque, that’s somebody else, that’s Stuart Mills, an old chum of mine. No, it was the Wild Hawthorn Press.
But hadn’t you done a few things before that with the other people?
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 4: Tape 2: Side B Page 28 I don’t know, I wouldn’t be surprised if Stuart did his things after me, I would think probably. No, I mean I started publishing partly because it was easier just to do the thing yourself than to try to tell other people how it ought to be done, and secondly, I just was bored with the whole idea of submitting things and getting them accepted or rejected. It seemed a long detour round that, if you wanted to make the work you just make the work, and that was it.
And why was it called Wild Hawthorn Press?
Because, in my ignorance I didn’t know that the epithet ‘Wild’ was superfluous; there’s no such thing as...except in the name of my press. No such thing as wild hawthorn, there’s only hawthorn, but I supposed that I thought there was maybe a kind of garden hawthorn and a kind of wild one, and it would be nicer to be the wild one. Anyway, as Dr Johnson said, you know, in his dictionary, ‘Sheer ignorance madam, sheer ignorance!’ (laughing)
Why hawthorn?
I suppose because I like things which suggest the countryside and are not urban, and generally stand for standing apart, or freedom, or something soppy like that.
When you...during the time you had as say, a shepherd, were there ideas that might become books in your mind then, or was that a later development?
When I was being a shepherd? Oh yes, when I was being a shepherd I would think of poems, but I had no idea what I would do. No. I mean I became a shepherd because I had some idea of getting a very small farm one day, but then I discovered that I got bored. Well the trouble was that, if you just had to work ordinary working hours or something and had some time to yourself, but the farm where I was initially, you had to go and feed the horses on a Sunday and things like this, and you never get any time really to yourself; then other times, at lambing time you had to work all the time, and at hay time you had to work all the time, and you couldn’t get any time to read or whatever, and I got very fed up. And, I’ve recounted somewhere else, some programme I did, about how I had this dream, you know this, no? Well I had one of those dreams that change your life, which is really a very nice dream, but very sort of corny I suppose, but corny things are often the nicest, in which I was in a kind of parkland, like you imagine Plato’s Academy, philosophical academy would be, but probably wasn’t at all, but like you could imagine it would be, and people were Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 4: Tape 2: Side B Page 29 walking about in pairs or in threes, discoursing very gravely. And there was a great feeling of order and thought. And this was a dream really, and I waked up and I thought, well I really would like to study philosophy. But since I left school, well, at fourteen but I really never was at school after I was about twelve, and in those days they didn’t let you into university unless you had passed exams, there was no hope of going to university.
So you didn’t ever take any exams, you managed to elude the whole thing?
I took what’s now called the 11-plus, in those days it was called the Quali, Qualifying or something like that, which I passed! (laughs) Otherwise I haven’t taken any exams, no.
And did you learn Latin? Presumably you did.
No no no, no. Well I did Latin at school when I was eleven or something, but... My parents lost all their money, and I went from a posh school to a school in Glasgow, and after I left the posh school I couldn’t understand anything any more, because everybody spoke a different language with strange words that I had never heard, and I just couldn’t understand anything any more. And after a term of Latin I still didn’t understand why some words ended in a and some in um, and so on. So, no.
So that must have been terribly isolating, that experience.
What, being at school?
Well suddenly not being able to understand.
Yes, it was very disconcerting, because without thinking of myself as clever, I had always thought of myself as somebody that would be sort of third top or something like this, and would manage the lessons quite well. No, it was really very disconcerting to me.
Had you been happy at the previous school?
No. No no, at the posh school you got beaten all the time. I was never happy at any school.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 4: Tape 2: Side B Page 30 And when you found yourself in this situation where you didn’t understand what was going on, did you have anyone to turn to, or not?
I suppose one’s parents, but I mean, I really just felt totally bewildered I suppose, wandered [?], would be the thing. But then, fortunately for me and unfortunately for many millions of people, the war began, and I got evacuated into the country, and never really went to school again, and I considered this to be a great deliverance.
And had you lived in the country before, or was that when it began really?
Well the posh school was in the country, but my father’s people were country people; my father was very country-ish. Yes, I really feel like a country person.
Did you know your grandparents?
I didn’t know my grandfather, I knew my grandmother, yes. But, the little cottage where they stayed is really the place that I regard as my real home, you know, and I might get buried in the graveyard near there.
Not here?
Well, I wouldn’t mind being buried here either, but I quite fancy being buried in this graveyard. And oddly enough, my sister was home from Canada recently, and she never really paid much attention I don’t think to that little cottage and so on, but she has amazed me by coming out and saying that she would like to get buried in that graveyard perhaps, because that's where her roots were. Really I was quite amazed, but...
And did you spend holidays there?
Not whole holidays, but weekends and things like that. It was a really very nice place. My grandfather was head of the sort of sawmill bit, or the forestry bit or something like this, but I never knew him because he was dead. But the house, the big house is called Hopetoun, which is a very famous Neoclassical mansion in great big grounds, and my uncle was nightwatchman in the building.
So you knew the building quite well?
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 4: Tape 2: Side B Page 31 Well quite well. I mean I was more interested in fishing and being up the burn than looking at architecture, but I suppose things become part of you without your realising it at the time, yes.
And there were people living in the house, it was in use, it wasn’t a...?
Well they were there sometimes only; a lot of the time it would be empty too, yes.
And was your grandmother the sort of grandmother that would tell you stories and things, or not?
No, when I knew her she was very very old, very very old, and...no, it would be my auntie that I talked with. I mean, it was another world when I look back on it. The man next door, there were two little cottages adjacent to each other, and then a little road and then a gate and beyond the gate a field with hens in it, and then before the cottages there was a sort of field which was a hay field in the summer time, and on the far side of it a very very old, what I suppose was once the big house before the Neoclassical mansion or whatever was built. But very very old house, about, like a castle sort of, with about six or seven storeys high, in which lived a very very poor family. I mean it was like something out of Stevenson or something. And...yes, the man next door, I can’t remember his name, on Sundays and special days he wore one of those swallow-tailed frock-coats, like I suppose Robespierre wore on the Festival of the Supreme Being. I mean it’s quite extraordinary to think this, that it wouldn’t have seemed outré, whatever, it was just another world. But I mean everything has changed so much, and when later I lived in a village that too was like another...well, lived outside the village, but it really was just like another world. I can’t explain it, but when I...I used to, at that time, when I wrote my stories in the morning, and then often I would do piecework, like spreading dung, or picking, showing turnips, whatever, picking potatoes, whatever, and you could walk home three or four miles along the main road and never meet a car the whole time. I mean the world was completely different and, I mean very very old-fashioned really.
And did you feel at one with it, or did you want to break out of it?
I suppose I’ve never really felt at one with anything, except when I was evacuated and was allowed to roam about the countryside fishing and chasing rabbits and things, it’s the only time I’ve really felt I was, you know, at one with anything.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 4: Tape 2: Side B Page 32 And you were evacuated in Scotland?
Yes.
And when did boats come into your life?
Och, all...well not all, but many wee Scottish boys go on their holiday to the seaside, and for me the great interest was either looking at the boats or, it was a great treat if you could get to go out with the boats, if a fisherman would take you out or whatever. But, I was always engrossed in them, and I used to...on another...I had another holiday at Aberdeen, and I used to get my auntie to take me down to the fish market at five o'clock in the morning and I would look at the trawlers and sometimes get invited on to a trawler and taken down below and given a cup of tea. And I could imagine no greater felicity than this. No, I’ve always been very very fond of the boats.
And you never wanted to be a fisherman?
Oh at that time I would have liked nothing better than to go on a trawler, but by the time I came to that age I thought differently about it, yes.
And did you draw at that stage?
I drew when I was sort of thirteen and fourteen and fifteen and things like that, yes, and when I was fourteen I went to work in Lewis’ department store in Glasgow as...they had a sort of studio where there was two or three commercial artists who painted the sets for the windows, and I was a kind of boy who got the clean paint water, and was allowed to fill in between the lines that they painted.
And what were the painters like?
The artists? They were just commercial artists, but they were very sweet. There was one called Sam who died, and he had something wrong with his heart, he died when he was twenty-seven or something, but he and I used to go...we subscribed to a magazine called The Artist, which no longer exists, but it was a very nice idealistic kind of magazine full of articles called ‘How to Paint in Watercolours’, ‘How to Paint Still Lives’ and so on. And then you could send in your work and it got criticised by the editor, like very fiercely, ‘You are trying to run before you can walk’ or ‘Your clouds have hard edges’ and all this kind of thing, you know. I’ve got a complete Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 4: Tape 2: Side B Page 33 bound set which I got quite recently. But really another...it belongs to another age too you know. And anyway we subscribed to this, and on Sundays we used to go on the bus out into the country and what was called sketch, and I didn’t have a proper easel because I couldn’t afford one, but I had a kind of blackboard easel which didn’t fold up, which caused enormous problems on the crowded buses, and which I eventually abandoned at Sam's instigation, behest, on the shores of Loch Lomond! But, yes, we spent our Sundays in this idyllic kind of way, sketching, and then going home in the evening tired but happy, or in my case often unhappy because the sketches didn’t live up to my expectations.
And have you still got those sketches?
Oh no no, heavens no. No no, no.
[End of Track 4: Tape 2: Side B] Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Page 34 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A
And at that stage, had you gone to the Scottish galleries and things? Had you started to see paintings, or not?
Well, in those days there wasn’t...I mean the world was so different, there wasn’t interest in art that there is now, and there were very very few artists and so on. But, very early on, I mean I knew MacBryde and Colquhoun when I was quite young.
How did you come to know them?
Well, I don’t really know, but they sometimes came back up to Glasgow, and then, I don’t want to really go into my personal life too much, but in those days I used to run off to London at quite regular intervals, and sometimes stayed with MacBryde and Colquhoun.
What were they like?
Well, the picture that the world has of them is not really as I knew them. They were very very hospitable, and MacBryde was very housewifely and kept the place very very clean. I mean they’re usually described as being very drunken and dissolute and so on, but MacBryde kept the place very clean. And when I look back on it, their hospitality was extraordinary, that one felt one could go there at any time. And later when I was in the Army I used to go a lot of weekend leaves to London and always stayed with the Roberts too.
It must have been a really bizarre contrast, the Army life and that.
No, not really either, because Colquhoun at that time was in the fire service, and...I mean, of course there were the air raids, and everything was very sort of intertwined, you know. But really what I remember is their remarkable hospitality, and also the meals that MacBryde used to cook. There’s a kind of peasants’ dish, Scottish peasants’ dish called stovies which he was very good at, on Sundays, and we used to have...the lunch or dinner or whatever would be rather late, because we would go to the pub and that, but MacBryde always cooked his stovies and things, and... You know, there’s this famous story about MacBryde ironing Colquhoun’s shirt with a hot teaspoon, which seems to me quite possible that he actually did this. But, the feeling was not of drunken dissoluteness or whatever. But maybe later they became like that, Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Page 35 I don’t really know, but it certainly wasn’t like that in my time. So at that time I knew a lot of artists and people, but as I say I don’t want really to go into this, but I’m really appalled when I think of my behaviour. I mean I had no...I had no sense of what was fitting. I think it was the second time I went to London, which, I always hitchhiked, and this was very exciting in the war time, because they would be bombing Birmingham or something on the way down and so on, and the transport cafés would be full of deserters and so on and so on. But, anyway, I think it was the second time when I would be about fifteen or something, and I liked Stephen Spender’s poems, so, I just phoned him up and said, ‘Could I meet you?’ And he sort of said, ‘Yes,’ you know, that he would meet me at Piccadilly Circus or whatever, and then he took me to Lyons Corner House and bought me a great big cream bun thing and so on. I mean I’m appalled when I look back at the presumption that I had.
And did he live up to your expectations?
Oh yes, oh yes, yes. No he was very nice, very pleasant.
And did you stay in touch with him?
No. No, because eventually I went off to the Army and that kind of thing. No.
So when you were sort of around fourteen, what would you have been reading in general?
I used to go, there’s a library in Glasgow called the Mitchell Library, which is a kind of, I suppose reference library you would call it; you couldn’t really take books away, you could go and read them at desks. And I was very interested in Cubism and I used to...there was a book by Ozenfant on Cubism which I was very fond of, and particularly books on Cubism I read at that time.
What had led you to them? I mean how did you come from this environment and find out there was such a thing as Cubism? I mean how did you know about that?
I don’t know how, I don’t know how at all, but, Herbert Read was another person that I read a lot, and I remember the second night of the Clydebank blitz, that, I was alone in the house in the morning and I was reading Herbert Read’s Surrealism, and I was going to try and cook myself some breakfast. Anyway I got so engrossed in this book that I forgot I had put the frying pan on, and it set the kitchen on fire, and I was sort of Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Page 36 roused from Surrealism by the lady upstairs coming to say there was a strong smell of burning. And it was sort of, kind of strange, because Clydebank was burning too, you know. I found those kind of books absolutely engrossing in those days, and it was all very exciting to me.
And did you read history books at that stage?
No, I didn’t. It was only later that I became interested in the past at all, yes.
And when you used to run away to London, was that partly to see exhibitions, or was it just the lure of London?
No, it was sort of the excitement of it. I would go to...because MacBryde had a contract I think with the Redfern or somewhere, I would go to the Redfern and places like that, but I never went to the Tate or the National Gallery, or anything of that sort, at all. Nor to the pubs I regret to say! (laughs)
And was the Army a sort of very difficult time?
No, it was quite all right really.
Did you do your own writing and drawing then, or not?
Well I sometimes used to...I remember reading Cyril Connolly’s Unquiet Grave in the NAAFI, and...usually wherever you were stationed you were allowed to go to libraries and get books out and things. But, I suppose I was more interested in the pubs, it has to be said! (laughs)
And did you make friends from that time? Did you stay in touch with anybody, or did you feel sort of more in tune with your private friends?
No, I found it really very easy to get on with people in the Army, it wasn’t difficult at all. But I didn’t really stay in touch with people afterwards. One or two people very intermittently, but...no, I didn't afterwards. I mean one or two people I did stay in touch with, because they had literary aspirations, or whatever, like that.
And were you ever really terrified?
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Page 37 No, because I never was in...I mean... It took, I don’t know, what, for every person in the front line there was sort of eleven other people or something to keep them there. I never was in any dangerous positions.
Given that we’ve established that you like extremity, was there a sort of edge during those years, because it was extreme, or not?
Well, I suppose, because...I found it quite entertaining in a way to be in the Army, because it was not what was expected of me.
What do you mean?
Well, I mean that...I mean, well I was more used to reading poetry and things like this, and it was quite strange to be doing rifle drill or taking Bren guns to bits or something, but precisely for that reason it was quite pleasing to me. And very few of the people who I knew were in the Army really.
And given that you were so attracted to boats, you didn’t want to go in the Navy?
Och no, you just went where you were put. But I mean, one of one’s main things in the Army was to think how you could get out of the Army! (laughs) I mean it’s not exactly like people imagine.
And when you went to be a shepherd, this was before the Army was it?
After.
After. So is that what you did...I mean, did you come automatically to Scotland again?
Yes, yes automatically. And I had the idea that I could have a small, a croft really, or a very very small farm, but I mean, this was not really a practical idea but it seemed...it was a sort of dream or something that I had, yes.
And then when you had your real dream, about the garden and the...
Here?
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Page 38 No, the dream where you dreamt about...
Oh yes, about the philosophy. But then I wasn’t able to do anything about that, because the only thing I could do was a postal course, but never had the money to do the postal course.
But had you been reading philosophy at all, or not?
Och yes, when I was wee I read philosophy a bit. Well I read things like C.M. Drodes[ph] History of Philosophy or Introduction to Philosophy or whatever, things like that. And I used to get sometimes books on philosophy out of the library and so on.
Did you have anyone you talked to about things like that, or not?
[pause] To some extent I suppose. I mean...in Glasgow at that time there were a lot of quite interesting people there; I mean, people would come up from London to get away from the bombing or whatever, and... It was a quite lively kind of life really. But, I suppose I was always an outsider, and always have been. I mean I either seem to be much younger than everybody else or much older than everybody else, somehow. But for a long time I was much younger than everybody else, and there was a problem that you weren’t allowed to go in the pub till you were sixteen or seventeen or something, and I would get put out, much to my annoyance! Very undignified.
And were you rebellious? Did you fight back over things like that, or not?
Oh you couldn’t fight back; if you were put out of the pub you were put out of the pub, I mean that’s it, there's nothing to be done about that, no. But...no, I mean in general I was really quite outrageous, that I would...before I went in the Army I would take jobs and stay for a week and then leave them, and... I mean, if I would think about it now in the middle of the night I would really want to go back to sleep quickly! (laughs) Really, I don’t like talking about my life, and there's very little about my life that I could...I mean I’m certainly not going to be one of those people who sits in a rocking chair and thinks about the ideal times they had in the past; I mean, the only ideal time I ever had was when I was evacuated, and that really was ideal.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Page 39 So when you were going from job to job, was it because you felt carefree or because you didn’t feel right in these places?
Well I got bored with the jobs, and it was...I mean I really...I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but certainly being in the jobs was not... I mean I really was terrible, I remember one job I got in this shop in Glasgow which sold sort of framed prints, and I was to put prints into frames and things. And of course I always stayed out so late at night that I slept in in the morning, and I started the Monday and by the Thursday I hadn’t been in on time once, and I really felt, I began to feel really embarrassed about it, and when I went in on the Thursday it was about ten o’clock or half-past ten instead of half-past eight, and I said to the wee man who owned the place, ‘This won’t do,’ I said to him, very sternly. (laughing) And he said, ‘Well, it’s not so good, but I hope you will consider staying.’ So, I mean, I don’t want to talk about it, it’s too too terrible, really too terrible, yes, yes. But, there was always this thing that I was kind of on the outside of the group in some way, either by being younger or by being different, or whatever. And I suppose that has continued in my life, that I mean from time to time over the decades I’ve maybe begun to be accepted or got a bit famous or whatever, but then always something happened that put me outside again, like, you know, for example when I took off my exhibition at the Scottish Arts Council Gallery at the very moment it was supposed to open, and I realised that this wouldn’t be popular but I hadn’t realised the extent to which it would be frowned on, or cause... The thing was that all the people, the posh people who go to the openings, were outside in the street and the drink and sandwiches were inside! (laughing) People took this very seriously indeed, and it was...I don’t suppose I’ve ever been forgiven for that, but certainly it was a long time before I was allowed to enter ordinary life again. I mean, not only the bureaucracy was annoyed at me for this, everybody was scandalised, nobody... I mean the assumption was that you would crawl for five miles for the right to have an exhibition; the idea that you would take your exhibition off at the very moment when it was supposed to open had never occurred to anybody.
Remind me why you did it.
Well I did it because...well it was a quite complicated situation, but essentially it was that it seemed to me that not having the exhibition would be a clearer...would be more understood or a clearer statement of what the exhibition was about, than having it. And, of course the Arts Council bureaucrats at this time took a very dim view of me, and they had all gone up to Inverness in order not to be at my openings, they had to get phoned and told that there wasn’t going to be an opening after all, you see. But, Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Page 40 for me the irony was that the preceding month there had been an exhibition which consisted of entirely blank canvases, but of course that was perfectly acceptable because the drink and sandwiches were there and everything, and the social occasion could take place. But my gesture ruined the social occasion, and that was not to be forgiven.
Had the exhibition been made, what would it have been?
Yes, it was the same exhibition substantially that I had in the Serpentine, and it went to a lot of different places on the way up here so to speak, but my relations with the SAC had become so bad and my relations with the world had become so bad, that I felt there was no chance that the work could possible be understood; there was no context, and without a context, cultural context, the work was meaningless. Whereas the absence of the works was very eloquent, it said precisely that there was no context for the works. And, I mean I was very serious about what I did; it wasn’t to cause a furore, it was because it was this old problem about, that the work is not explicable without a proper context, and I suppose it was the beginning of the thing about the secularisation what really...
And do you think anybody was provoked to think about why you were doing it?
The SAC bureaucrat who was supposed to be present at the opening was, yes. Yes, he was.
But I mean to think about it intelligently as opposed to...
Well he thought about it intelligently, and really was quite sympathetic to me. He even said to me, ‘I understand why you are doing it.’ And I had many further brushes with him, because he was there when we made the robbery on the SAC and so on. But I always remained on very good terms with him, in spite of, even when he was furious at me, we seemed to get on quite well really and understood each other’s position. And of course after there had been a lot of wars and things, then, it doesn’t really matter what side you’re on, you’re kind of old comrades and you develop that. You know like when they have their reunions between the Germans and the British soldiers, and they’re all chums, like that, yes.
And you feel like that with him?
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Page 41 Oh yes, very much so, yes.
And he’s still part of the SAC?
No, unfortunately the new regime retired him, yes.
And the Serpentine show you’re talking about, was that the one which included the bees?
Yes, yes that one.
Can you tell be a bit about that? One of the things I loved was your saying that the beehive was the bees’ temple.
Oh that, but in this case the beehives were the aircraft carriers. The work was...the subject of the work was the Battle of Midway, which was really the turning point of the Pacific war, and as a battle really has always interested me. And I represented, I turned it into a kind of renaissance tableau as it were, and the American and Japanese carriers were each represented by a beehive. And in this battle the opposing battle fleets never saw each other, because the aircraft, when they took off from the carriers, flew a great distance across the Pacific to find the American fleet, and they actually passed each other in the air. And I represented the lush distances of the Pacific with the tubs containing the blossom trees, and in this was concealed the tape with the sound of the bees, and the sound drifted amongst the leaves. And it must have been quite authentic, because one visitor actually claimed to have been stung. Anyway...
But there was no bee there at all.
There were no bees, no. But, obviously it was authentic. And then, as a sort of complement to this, round the walls were documentary photos of the battle, which I got from the American and Japanese governments and framed them. So there was the two things, the kind of documentary thing and the stylised allegorical thing. And it was really quite an exciting work, and it was eventually...I had hoped it would be bought by the Americans, not because of selling it, because I had wanted it to have a home in America, but it was actually bought by the...the big French library in Paris. Biblio...
Bibliotèque Nationale? Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Page 42
Yes. Yes they bought it, eventually, many many years later. But yes, I was very enthusiastic about this work, and it was shown last year or something in some country place in France.
And when you say that battle interested you, I mean, because you had lived through that time and you knew...?
Well, yes, I mean there is the fact that you lived through the time, but I never really took in the time in that way. At the time, it was only long after that I began to take in the time. And this battle really fascinated me, because it seemed so Homeric, epic, and, I had seen a lot of film of it, and similar battles, on television. And I just find it extraordinarily kind of compelling, and really like the world of the pre-Socratics, or, to go further back, Homer and so on. Very very compelling. And there is the other thing, that, because one lived through the time it has this, I don’t know, a strange compulsion for one. But in another, I never lived through the time, at the time; I mean I had only the vaguest...during the Second World War when I was really quite a wee boy in the Army, I imagined that the Philippines were in South America; it’s only quite recently that I discovered where the Philippines were, because I got in touch with a man who is the head or director of a thing called the Kamikaze Society, and I thought he would be a very useful ally in my battle with the Region, and he gave me some nice photographs of him posing between bombs, which I reproduced in my imaginary newspapers called the Strathclyde Times, which recounted some of the events that didn’t and did take place in the war of the Region. Yes. But...yes, I mean...there’s a thing about...I quite like reading, or looking at, books about the war, but it’s clear to me that part of the thing is that the photographs are so compelling, because in the end, what dominates in these photographs is the weather, like the war kind of fades out of the photographs and what you're left with is the weather. In the same way that, with domestic photographs so to speak the people fade out and what you’re left with is the fashion, or the obsolete fashion is what dominates the photograph, and it becomes like, full of strange sensations, content, which you can’t explicate but which is really fascinating. So, I have quite a number of books about the war on the Russian front, and I mean partly they’re fascinating because of the war being so extraordinary and so on, but also because of the weather in the photos. I mean, but it’s like, weather become feeling, or feeling become weather, I can’t explain it, but it’s something that I find really fascinating. I can’t explain it.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Page 43 But it is...I mean for example, with the Gulf War when they had those terrible planes that, you just set them off and they go exactly where they’re programmed to go, and therefore presumably weather of any kind isn’t going to affect them, is that irrelevant to what you’re saying?
No, it’s not that things were affected by the weather; it’s that after fifty years or something, the photographs undergo, some change occurs in them. And like when you look at old photographs of people and so on, it’s not really the people who you see, it’s the time that you see. I mean it’s the essence of the time is what is left. And in the war photos, it’s the essence of the time, but it’s something, the essence of the time become the weather.
But isn’t it also that the technology of the camera from the war pictures, a plane is always seen against a vast space, whereas presumably now, it could zoom in and it would be a different scale.
Yes, I mean I don’t know what will happen to the photos. I only can recount my experience of the photos and why I find the books compelling. I mean I got yesterday a catalogue of new war books, and I’ll probably buy something from it, but when I look at it, it won’t really be because I’m particularly interested in the war, but because of this strange compelling feeling in the photographs. But who can explain such things, you know?
And when did you start to read Homer?
Oh quite recently. I never read such things when I was wee, but only quite recently, yes.
So when you said that the battle seemed Homeric, that was sort of my association rather than anything too literal?
No, I mean, for instance the Falklands war, some of the images from that I found just extraordinary, because they were purely pre-Socratic images; I mean I recognised...I mean they were Heraclitus, they were Parmenides, they were Anaxagoras. I mean, it wasn’t like you were looking at something from this time at all. It really amazed me.
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Purely from a visual point of view.
Well it’s a visual, as the receptacle or something, of feeling, content. I mean it’s a mystery. But you could say, I mean, some of those astonishing shots of the Argentine planes attacking the British warships in that Sound, I mean, that’s the world of Homer. I mean it’s incredible bravery of both sides, and the presence of death as a kind of absolute, when we’re accustomed to a society which is trying to eliminate absolutes. I mean, it’s something one's being recognises as utterly compelling: well I find it so, anyway. And then, just visually some of the images were purely Greek, I mean really Greek, I mean, with Port Stanley as Troy, and the fleet sailing all this way. I mean, those shots you see on telly of the fleet sailing through these incredible wild seas to this far place. I mean, of course our society, the intellectuals mock it or whatever, and no doubt it is in its way reprehensible, but I mean it's all so amazing. I mean...I’m really moved by it to the depths of my being.
And was it a shock to you that we went to war?
No, no. But, it was a shock to me that a number of people that I knew could trivialise it so much, but of course other people I knew didn’t, but, it really amazed me that... I remember the literary editor, arts editor of the Glasgow Herald happened to come here at that time to see the garden, and he went on very heatedly about how, you know, what the British Government was doing was wicked, and so on and so on and so on. But it was clear that he had no sense of this other sort of content of the war. I mean to him it was just trivial, it wasn't Homeric, and I suppose he would have been shocked at the idea that it was Homeric, but it was, and just, even just a visual thing it was so extraordinary, so epic, and moving, so moving, to me.
And was there any kind of parallel with the Gulf, when that happened, did you find that at all?
I feel we got such an edited version of that, and also, places where there’s desert and heat and so on I never can empathise with; it’s the same as India, I never can feel that I have anything to do with them, it’s like some strange backdrop or whatever. But, I mean, in the case of the Falklands, the core of the war or something seemed so straightforward; I mean, that one country had invaded another country, and there wasn't all the complications of the Gulf War. I mean, I feel that we would never Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 6: Tape 3: Side B Page 45 know what the Gulf War was really about, or whatever, we would never be told, but the other war seemed like Troy, you know, I could really see Port Stanley as Troy quite easily. Yes. Oh I did...it was in the ICA, did you see my ICA exhibition? I did a work for the Falklands War, a sort of memorial, really about the sinking of the HMS Sheffield, but I’m really very fond of this work and I was very sad that...I had hoped that the Imperial War Museum would buy it, but they never show any interest in my works at all, and I wrote me a little letter and said will you at least go and see it, but they never replied to me.
So that would have been lovely if they had bought the bee piece actually as well.
Yes, it would...yes, and it seemed to me that the stuff they buy is mostly terrible, and they buy the most crudely anti-war kind of art. Well I’m not against anti-war art, but I’m against that stuff which is tritely, crudely, grossly so, without...you know, just because it’s the fashion at the moment, and this seems to be what they buy, from the Lisson Gallery and places like that. It’s a shame really. But anyway, this work, with the architect friend, we designed a little building which I would have hoped could have been built in Sheffield itself, because the warship being connected with Sheffield, but of course there’s no hope of that at all, but then I had...I had the plans for the building in the exhibition, and then the actual text cut in in stone which would go in the building. But the texts were all just adapted from existing text by the pre- Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, and, well one or two people have said to me that they really like this work very much, and I think it’s very very good work, I really feel very pleased with it. But it has had no public life; I mean it was in the ICA but it might as well have been in a private place because I feel there was no context for it at all, and this was very disappointing for me. I mean, I really would like it to be made into a proper memorial somewhere. But, as I say, the point was that I was able to use the texts from Heraclitus, and I changed them a tiny little bit, but they were perfectly applicable.
And things like, I mean the fact that the war has always been part of the work, things like the tortoise, with the panzer thing written on it, that came very early didn't it? I mean it’s always been integrated.
Well, I mean the thing is that, you can’t talk about...I mean people...I just read a review yesterday of the Abrioux book in an American landscape architecture magazine, and it talked about my using a lot of themes from the war, but I mean, this is not a proper way to think. I mean what one's got to see is that imagery from Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 6: Tape 3: Side B Page 46 warships or whatever, whatever, it’s not that...I mean, the image means what the artist intends it to mean by making the context for it to signify, but because this whole thing is the subject of this immense taboo at the moment, like you're not allowed to...I mean power is what is the taboo; it’s not just war it’s power or force that’s the taboo, and it has the same influence or whatever. Being in our society there’s this taboo on sex, and in the Victorian society, and all, every society has its taboos, and every society tends to imagine that it is uniquely free from taboos, you know. But in our case it’s always something to do with power that’s the taboo. And when imagery is across, like within an area where the taboo operates, then people are not able to see it as art, in the same way that some people can’t see nudity as part of art, like for them all nudity equals pornography or whatever, whereas it’s perfectly clear that nudity may equal Botticelli, may equal Neoplatonist idealism, or Christian idealism, or whatever, that the nude hasn’t got a fixed meaning, or significance, or being; it’s what is made by the work of art for it. And you can’t say that the battleship, if represented in stone or in paper has such and such a meaning; I mean, this is to succumb to the taboo of the time. In the case of the tortoises, I had originally two real tortoises in the garden, and I just knew tortoises from, you know, Greek fables and things, that they are very slow and they’re very gentle, and so on. But, I think these must have been male tortoises, but anyway they were the most macho creatures you could imagine, and far from being slow, they used to go way up the moor, and they went at an incredible speed up the moor, like fast panzers or something like [makes noise of moving tortoises]. You would almost have to run to keep up with them. And secondly, far from being peaceful, they were absolutely horrendous in their habits, because it used to grow lettuces and things in the front garden at that time, and they used to attack these lettuces and rend them, and you could hear, oh, for oh, 100, 200 yards away, you could hear this chewing and wrenching going on. And then they had this other habit of, like tanks, they actually dug themselves into the ground, and covered themselves with straw and things. I don’t know why they did this, whether it was to enjoy the sun or what, but anyway they did this. And I thought, well this is really ridiculous, that, this is not a pacifist creature, it’s a panzer leader, and panzer leaders are the type who are General Guderian’s autobiography, and he was the great exponent, original exponent, of panzer warfare. So, when letterer Michael Harvey visited me I got Michael to paint on them in non-poisonous acrylic paint, ‘Panzer Leader’ and they walked around and so on. But it turned out that the winter here was too long and the poor things never woke up again, they just slept, so I got the bronze ones made and just had the same lettering on them. And it’s really a comment on the nature of tortoises, not on the nature of warfare or whatever.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 6: Tape 3: Side B Page 47 Was that the beginning of that kind of imagery coming in, or did it already...what was the thing?
Well, there was a time, yes, when I began to use that kind of imagery, because, up until that time I had thought of...I actually wrote a kind of testament which said that poets shouldn’t talk about this, this or this or this, you should only talk about this, this, this and this. And, you know...I can’t remember what was on the two lists, but undoubtedly panzers would have been one of the things you weren’t allowed to talk about. But, at this time it began to be clear to me that inconsequentiality, which I had regarded as being a kind of form of purity, like a way that modernism could accept purity or embody purity was through inconsequentiality. And then I began to see that everything, everything, was just getting this kind of flip response, not only in me but in the other poets who I knew. And this kind of, sort of shallow superiority was the prevailing attitude. And I began to be very very dissatisfied with this, and want to extend or deepen my work, or my life, that just, treating everything as a kind of joke became boring in the end, and being superior to everything and everybody became boring in the end. So I turned quite consciously to the tragic, first through fishing boats, and then through the war imagery, and... It was this feeling that the absolute had been banished and had to be brought back into the art and the world in some way, and there had to be another kind of purity beyond just inconsequentiality, which had seemed satisfactory for a long time.
Surely inconsequentiality is the sort of balance against, perhaps rather plodding thought or over-simplistic thought. And again, it’s complex.
Yes. It’s hard to explain. I mean, all I can say is that it kind of worked as a way of creating purity, this kind of inconsequentiality. And ones like Simon Cutts and so on still do it; I mean Simon does it very nicely I think, in his poems, it’s a kind of deliberate inconsequentiality and, reductionism, is there such a word? Anyway, reducing of things. And it’s very pleasing, but it’s also very limited, and in the end one wants to, or I wanted to go beyond it.
Did you and Simon feed one another? I mean you worked together for a bit didn’t you?
Well Simon and I always had quite a troubled relationship! (laughs) Yes. I mean, to me...I mean I like Simon’s poetry very much, and I like Simon very much, but at the same time I see him as a buccaneer, and I don’t suppose he really likes me very much, Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 6: Tape 3: Side B Page 48 but he obviously sees me as a Sunday School teacher. And he quite recently did a card which was based on that hymn, which has the refrain, ‘You in your small corner and I in mine.’ But Simon had got it a wee bit wrong and he put, ‘You in your small corner and me in mine.’ Verisimilitude is not Simon's strong point. There’s one poem where he spells yachts, y-a-t-c-h-s. Yes.
And that’s a real mistake, rather than intended.
Yes, it’s obviously a real mistake, he never read the proofs. It’s quite an endearing mistake, but anyway, it’s a real mistake, there. Anyway, but...yes, this card says, like...it’s a sort of thing of this hymn, I suppose, ‘He in his small corner and I in mine,’ but it’s got some sort of title that brings in Sunday schools, and then, me. And then, when he sent me the card he said that it was...he wrote a sort of note on it saying that it was meant to be hostile but it had turned out quite friendly, or something like this! (laughing) Yes. And, he did another, he’s done two or three attacks on me because of my Sunday school aspects, which obviously infuriate him.
Well what would he say were your Sunday school aspects?
Well the fact that I moralise and use words like purity and goodness, and things like this, quite unashamedly. I mean I have two reputations, one as being a very wicked, Nazi sort of person, and the other as being very wickedly good and moralising. Unfortunately the two never meet; I always sort of think they should meet and cancel each other out, and a true picture might emerge. But those are my two reputations. And ones like Simon and Jonathan Williams and all those kind of people are very perturbed by my aspirations.
By your aspirations, or what they perceive to be your aspirations?
Well I suppose the two are not so distinct, only, I mean...I mean I’m very much in favour of Robespierre, I mean I’m an ardent Robespierreist, and I'm not at all troubled by his moralising, and the use of the word virtue appeals to me no end, and I would do it unhesitatingly and unblushingly. And also words like purity and goodness, decency, and so on. But these words are not really acceptable to people like Simon, they’re very much frowned upon!
And were you part of the setting up of Coracle? Were you involved in that?
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 6: Tape 3: Side B Page 49 Oh no. No no. No no, I wouldn't be allowed to be part of Coracle. I’ve never been allowed to be part of anything.
Have you ever wanted to be?
Yes, desperately, but, I mean, I couldn’t be part of Coracle because of my attitudes, which would not be acceptable to...
Because you’re really wanting the context...I mean you’re really wanting what you’re saying to have meaning in a society outside art, in the sense that a lot of Coracle things were restricted really in their intentions.
Yes, but I mean you can’t say...I mean I wouldn’t say they were restricted, but they are restricted in a sense, but I mean I don’t hold it against them. I mean, I find a lot of Coracle productions very charming, and, I mean, Stephen Duncalf, whose work I find very very charming, is published by Coracle. But it would be perceived that there was some reason that I couldn’t be allowed to be part of it. I don’t know what it would be, but it would be quite clear. And that’s my fate. I mean I suppose in the French Revolution I would have been guillotined very early on probably. I mean, I see that as my destiny, always to be on the outside, but always to be wanting to be part of something. I mean I would really like to...I really would like to have been David, orchestrating the great processions for Robespierre, I mean that would really have been...
But isn’t he an outsider, because not to be an outsider is to be a member of the procession?
No, it’s not right really. I can’t explain it, but it’s just clear to me that...that my role is to remain on the outside, and every time that I’ve almost been accepted or have been accepted a bit, then some dire catastrophe ejects me again.
But don’t you think...I mean I’ve never talked to him about it and I don't know him very well, but don’t you think Simon would consider himself an outsider?
Och yes, but the greatest crowd in our time is formed of individualists. I mean, they are the crowd. I mean, Simon I’m sure has many people around him who he would feel very very at home with, and who would frown on me, there would be a sort of frisson with. You can’t explain these things, you can only kind of observe them; I Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 6: Tape 3: Side B Page 50 mean I observe them clearly. This interview I did about the avant-garde, with this man called Zerbrug[ph] which I just had to re-read because it was taped and I had to correct it, in it I tell the story, which is quite true, that long long ago in one of my other lives, an artist I knew said, ‘We have a very fine Gauguin in the National Gallery,’ and I thought, this is really great, ‘We have a very fine Gauguin in the National Gallery.’ And I thought, well, the next time I’m at a party or something I’ll try this. So, I said it, and everybody stopped talking and looked at me, and said things like, ‘What do you mean, we have a very fine...?’ So I knew that, I’m not allowed, that I mustn’t ever think of myself as part of something, that if I’m tolerated that’s the most I can expect. And I suppose that I am reluctantly tolerated in some quarters now, but it’s tolerated, it's not any more than that. But of course what I would like would be the revolution and the barricades, and... I mean I liked the Battle day because there was an ‘us against them’, and I had managed for once to inspire everybody to take part in something and to do what I told them to do, that it would really work if they did this. And this was really a happy day for me.
And when you call it a battle, and you had the Saint-Just Vigilantes, they were non- violent themselves weren’t they? What actually happened?
Well it had to be non-violent, because...I mean it was a battle or a war in the true sense, because my opinion would be that the Region has acted illegally or outwith the law, that they have assumed the right to re-interpret the law, not in terms of what it says but of what they think it must mean. And therefore, obtaining warrants and so on they have acted illegally, therefore there is a state of war, not peace. It’s not governed by law or reason, and that’s the very precise sense in which I call it a war. And on the actual Battle day, well, we knew in advance that the sheriff officer was coming, because he had to come beforehand and arrest certain things which would then be sold off forcibly. This is what warrant sale is, so... He’s really quite a striking person, he’s very tall and good-looking, and he’s got a very dramatic kind of scar from some sabre fight one would suppose, or duel or something, and he obviously has his suits hand-made, and really quite a nice person. Anyway, he came in advance and arrested these works in the Temple, and amongst other things he chose to arrest three representations of dryads. And I said to him, ‘Do you think it is wise that these are what you arrest?’ Because I could see what would happen. And I suppose that perhaps he thought they would look nice on his mantelpiece or something. Anyway he insisted on these, so, it was fixed that he was to come back in two weeks’ time or something, so I had plenty of time to arrange everything. And I got as many Saint- Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 6: Tape 3: Side B Page 51 Just Vigilantes, people, to come as was possible on the day, and they came from all over Britain.
Who were they?
Well just people I knew; obviously one of them wasn’t Simon, because he would never do that.
Because he’s a coward?
No, not because he’s a coward. No, he’s not a coward, no, but he would consider...I don’t know, he would consider it as infra dig to take part in such a thing, or to contemplate such a thing. I mean, the idea of corporate action against authority would not occur to any of these people. Anyway.....
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But none of the vigilantes were local people?
No, except the farmer, and...well I knew really that there were certain fixed things which allowed me to make a plan of battle, and we made...not my own gate but the middle gate we turned into a checkpoint like they had in Berlin, a checkpoint. The sheriff officer is always known as Sandy, perhaps to make him seem cosy which he is certainly not. Anyway, Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, it was Checkpoint Sandy, and we had a striped pole with a weight on it and everything. And then we had a mock-up of a full-size panzer covering the gate and camouflaged. And then we had lots of minefields, which are very easy to make, because you just put up notices saying, ‘Achtung, Minen’ and you’ve got a minefield. And then I had my HQ up in the barn, where I could be hidden amongst the bales of straw but could see what was happening out the window. And then we had the, I’m sure the longest string telephone, you know, with tin can and string like you make when you’re wee, ever, which, with two exchanges on the way up went from the middle gate right up to here. And...well I just...I had my own plan, and the plan was to get the sheriff officer inside Little Sparta, and out the middle gate there’s a bridge across a stream, quite a narrow bridge, and then to get the farmer to bring his tractor and block the bridge with the tractor, take off the wheel, so then the sheriff officer would be trapped in Little Sparta, which would be the opposite of what he expected, because he would expect to be outside. And, so anyway we did this, and of course being Strathclyde Region they made assignation, or this thing, the sheriff officer was to come at noon. And it was a bitterly cold day, with snow on the ground and a leaden sky, it was like Stalingrad or something. And we had a Red Cross tent, with a Red Cross flag, and our own flag, which was, on one side a lyre and on the other a twin-barrelled Oerlikon gun. And a Red Cross lady to dispense tea to everybody, and so on and so on and so on. So anyway he turned up, and I was hidden up there, and of course when he was challenged by the red and white striped pole, he felt he had to come through. I forgot to say that, eighty reporters came, an incredible number of reporters, and two different television companies. And I made everybody park in the field outside the checkpoint, so they wouldn’t be trapped in, and the fields were frozen so it was quite easy for things to park. Anyway, he, when he came to the gate he had to stop at the checkpoint, and then the vigilantes were there with all of their vigilante buttons, and he said, ‘Do you know who I am?’ And...
Was he alone? Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 7: Tape 4: Side A Page 53
He had a helper.
A man?
A man. And then, they said, ‘Well we hope you’re the sheriff officer,’ whereupon he lifted the gate thing, pull, and as the paint was still wet he was promptly covered with red and white paint. Anyway, he came through and stopped his car the other side of the gate, and then word was sent up by this string telephone. So I gave orders then that the farmer was to be phoned, and he was waiting on his tractor with the engine running, and he drove round and onto the bridge, and he took the wheel off and went away down the road wheeling the wheel in front of him. And now the sheriff officer was trapped in Little Sparta, he didn’t know this yet, so, I knew that he would want to go into the Temple where the dryads were that he had arrested with this notice, it says, ‘You're now the property of the Queen.’ But, we had removed the dryads from the Temple and we took them down to that pine wood at the foot of the road and buried them, because we thought the dryads would be safe amongst the trees. And you see nobody had ever done anything like this before, like moved objects which had been put under arrest by the Regions, or... Also, we had barricaded all the doors in the Temple from inside so you couldn’t get in, and I knew that in order...therefore in order to get in he would have to break in, but before he would break in he would have to ask me sort of formally, would I open the door for him, and then if I refused he would break in. So, he then...the first thing he did was to try to find me, and everywhere he went he was followed by the eighty reporters and the two television crews, and a great lot of Saint-Just Vigilantes. And so he searched the house, and he searched everywhere, but one place he didn’t search was up where my thing was, which had a big notice and it saying, ‘HQ Little Sparta’. Anyway, so this went on, and it took him a long long time.
Did he feel foolish?
I don’t know what he felt, but he behaved with great dignity throughout, and really a lot of the thing was possible because of the way that he behaved, but...and you must imagine, he looked so...he looked very like Clint Eastwood, this is the truth of it, very like Clint Eastwood, so Clint Eastwood strode around! But anyway, eventually he decided that maybe I had gone, or couldn't be found, or whatever, so that he would break in, but before he would break in he would go for the police, so he went to his car to go for the police. And of course at this point he discovered that he couldn’t get Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 7: Tape 4: Side A Page 54 his car out, so he had to walk six miles to the phone, all the way down the road and everything. And that was a very dramatic time, because we had no idea whether he would come back with three hundred armed, terrible, fierce, Strathclyde police, or what would happen, and I really was quite worried. And, at one point we thought we would go and hide up in the hills, but when we started off up into the hills we were followed by the eighty reporters and the television crews so there was clearly no point in pursuing that. So anyway, we had our sentries all along the top of the hill, and we had a bell which was to be tolled when the sheriff officer came back into sight, so, eventually he was sighted and the bell tolled; really it was very dramatic. Anyway, he only came back with the local police from Biggar, no armed police. So, one of the reporters had told him where I was hidden, so, I had some other vigilantes with me, so he came up the stair and there we were. So, we all went down and came out with our hands up, which looked very good for the photos and the film. And the reporters all gathered round, said to me to make a speech, so I make a speech saying that what was happening was illegal, and calling on the United Nations to make a parachute drop into Strathclyde Region to restore the rule of law. And while I was doing this, he was checking out the back of the Temple, and at the end there’s a little window which I hadn’t barricaded or anything because it never occurred to me he could possibly get in it. But anyway he had some burglar’s tool, and he managed to get this window open, and went in. And in the middle of my speech the cry went up, ‘He’s in, he’s in, he’s in.’ And everybody pressed to the windows you see, to look in. And at this time, we had special slippers at the door inside, that if you went in you had to put on the slippers, take off your shoes. So here the first thing he did was to put on the slippers. Yes, I mean he was very good. And then he could be seen, and he went and he looked where the dryads should have been and they weren't there of course, and then he started looking in the cupboards and everywhere, watched by everybody, and with the lights on you know. And then he came out, and I thought well, this is it now, that we will all be arrested and taken off, because we’ve moved the things that belong to the Queen. And everybody gathered round, and he made this little speech, which was very dignified, and said that he had finished here for the day, and he would now return to the Region for further instructions. And that was it. And then, I noticed that...I had always said, if he dares enter the Temple, Apollo will shoot him with an arrow, and here he had this little wound on the back of his hand which was bleeding profusely, and to this day I don’t know where this wound came from because there was no broken glass with the window, there was no sign... Anyway, it was bleeding quite profusely, and Sue was still here then, and he turned to her and said could he wash his wound. So she said yes, so everybody parted and made this place...and he followed her, and she washed his wound in the bathroom and bound it up. And I phoned the Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 7: Tape 4: Side A Page 55 farmer and said come and, you know... So then I said to the sheriff officer, ‘You will find that you can now drive away,’ so he went off, and that was it.
Would you have quite liked to have been arrested?
No, I didn’t want to be arrested. No I didn’t want to be arrested. But I must say that the excitement was such, and I suppose the adrenalin, that afterwards I felt, if only they had come with armed police, and we had had arms too, that really to fight it out would have been great. I mean that’s really what I felt. But of course in my ordinary mood I’m absolutely aghast at such an idea. But it really seemed this would have been wonderful, really wonderful. But it was good enough as it was, and of course all the vigilantes felt triumphant, and the next day they all said, ‘When are we going to have another battle?’ you see. And I said, ‘Well the thing is, we can never do this again, that they know now.’ And of course, this wasn't the end of it, I knew that he would be back. So he just waited till Budget Day when the attention of the press was elsewhere, and obviously I couldn’t keep a standing army here, and I was just alone, so he came, and came to the door, and said he was going to go into the Temple. So, I said, well there’s nothing I can do about it, so he just went in, and they cleared a room of stuff, and took it away in the car, and... I mean true, I could have let down the tyres while he was in the Temple or something, but that would have been ignominious compared to the great formal thing that had happened before. So he took the stuff, and then he put it into, I think it was Sotheby’s; no, no, it was one of the art auction rooms in Glasgow anyway. He foolishly...the press asked him instantly where the things were, and he said it was in a Glasgow art auction house, and as there was only three I think it was quite easy to find out which one, so everybody wrote and simply said, ‘You’re holding stolen property,’ and got them in a great state of embarrassment and so on and so on. And...
Sorry, that was partly because some of that belonged to somebody else wasn’t it?
Yes, but in any case, I mean I regarded that they had no right to take the things, whatever, but they had doubly no right to take things that belonged to somebody else. And, well so it went on. And the Region sent him on holiday out the way, and... Well then they kept...they’re not allowed in law to keep the things punitively, they have to auction them off, but they never dared, because they were so impressed with the Saint-Just Vigilantes, who were largely mythical in a sense, but they felt that if they...that my lawyer eventually in Glasgow got to see the correspondence between the sheriff officer and the Region, and they had this long correspondence about how Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 7: Tape 4: Side A Page 56 they could manage to sell the things off without the Saint-Just Vigilantes, whatever, you know. And in the end they never dared do it, so after what, five years or something, he just brought the things back. But in the meantime there had been the confrontation between the Wadsworth Athenaeum or the US State Department and the Region, and other nice things like this.
And the whole thing had arisen because of the disagreement about how the Temple should be rated, was it?
Yes, that’s correct. I mean I consider that...the law says any building which is used wholly or mainly for religious purposes, and is related to a body rather than to an individual, is exempt from tax, and so I consider that the building is exempt from tax, that the body is either, doesn’t matter, the Saint-Just Vigilantes or the Neoclassical tradition, as such. And it would seem to me that if the Festival of the Supreme Being organised by David for Robespierre was a religious event, and most historians would allow it to be so, then my building can be religious. And I would maintain that there is something called the revolutionary Neoclassical tradition which would include David, I would include Corot; I mean, the people in it don’t have to be consciously revolutionists, but the essence of their work has to be Puvis I would say. And the Le Nain brothers who come before David, and so on. But I mean the point is really to oppose the, or bring into consciousness, the secularisation of the culture, in which, what the SAC would wish is that the garden is turned into a tourist place, you see.
You mean they want you to start charging money?
Well the Region holds that the building is a commercial art gallery, which it’s clearly not, clearly not.
What, you mean they’re saying that people come here and buy a work of art and go away with it?
Oh I don’t think they think it through, but for them any building which contains works of art which the public can enter must be a commercial art gallery; they haven’t got any...well unless it was an established tourist, historical tourist mansion or something like this. I mean, you mustn’t overestimate the degree to which people actually think, they don’t really think, they use phrases. And they have no...they have no conception of what a garden temple is, I mean they’ve really no conception of what a garden is. And my position is that I live not only in Strathclyde Region but in Britain, in Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 7: Tape 4: Side A Page 57 Western Europe, and I have a right to my own culture, and you have a right to interpret the law in terms of the culture.
[break in recording - telephone]
Now you have to ask a question now.
So how is it resolved?
It’s not resolved. I’ve never paid any money. Now they’re taking me to court, I suppose any time now, and I and a number of people, many people, have asked the SAC to make some clear elucidating statement, but they have refused to do it. And many years ago when the sheriff officer asked the SAC, on my suggestion, that they make a statement to the Region, the SAC again voted not to say anything, which is very reprehensible.
But in terms of the garden, it's not advertised anywhere, it’s word of mouth isn’t it, that brings people here?
No, I mean people don’t pay to come to the garden.
But I mean they would find out about it by reading about your work. It’s not like sort of looking at a guide book and seeing it [inaudible].
No it is in a number of guide books, but not by my choice but because it gets...I mean there’s a book someone came with. It’s in the Baedeker, I was amazed. I mean they never asked me, but somebody came with it and showed it to me.
But presumably, if it happens that a gallery owner comes, and as a result of coming they commission a work, then you’re taxed on that piece of work just as you would if you anywhere else.
Yes, but I mean such things don’t really happen anyway, I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that.
And actually, one thing I was going to ask, that big wedge of stone we were talking about when we came in from our walk, and you said that was a commission that had Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 7: Tape 4: Side A Page 58 would be going, is all the large work done here, and then shipped, or is some of it made at your specification on site?
No, it’s all made in the workplaces of my collaborators, it’s not made here, no. But I mean nothing that’s placed in the garden is removed and sold or moved elsewhere, I mean, several times people, especially Americans, have offered to buy things out of the garden, but I’ve always explained to them that I don’t move anything out of the garden. I mean, things really placed in the garden should be left exactly where they are, because then things grow round them, and...
No, I was really sort of jumping, I wasn’t asking to do with this ridiculous rateable thing. I was surprised that the big wedge was here, because I had assumed that those massive great pieces that, like Osso for example, couldn’t have come from here, they would have been made...
Well they were made somewhere else, but Osso was here for a time, but it was bought by some Swiss collection, so that’s where it is. And, yes, that piece, I explained why that piece is here, but...
Sorry, but that piece has been brought here because the commission hasn’t gone through, or it was made here?
No, it was not made here, it was made in Somerset, and exhibited in Frankfurt and then brought back here after Frankfurt, and then it was, as I say, going to go to America, but this problem with the architect and the university occurred.
What’s the name of the piece?
It’s my Star/Steer poem, the same as is in the bathroom. Well not exactly the same, but some part the same.
So this is really just pure chance that you’ve seen the actual piece of work. It’s quite rare in that sense.
I don’t think I have actually seen it, because, I’ve only seen photos of it, because it was wrapped up when it...it has never been unwrapped, no. But, in a way the question is misguided, because obviously I see the work very clearly before it’s ever made.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 7: Tape 4: Side A Page 59 I was just wondering if you had literally seen it and if there was any discrepancy.
To judge by the photos, no. But of course, I ask my collaborators to do drawings and things, so, in the case of stone works, you should be able to...I mean they should follow the drawing, what they do. But, it’s not a problem because I really see the work very clearly, and it doesn’t worry me whether I see the actual work or don’t see it. And as I say, I don’t think I have actually seen that; I mean I’ve seen the bulk of it, but I think that the text bit is perhaps face-down, I’m not too sure. But I know it from photographs of it, and of course from the drawings.
And how do you collaborate? I mean for example, in the book there’s two images based on pansies, which you have worked on with Ian Gardener.
Yes.
How do you collaborate over a painting like that, how does it work?
Well, I know what Ian Gardener’s watercolours are like for a start, and I know exactly how he works, I mean I know exactly his technique, so I’ve a very good idea what the work will turn out like. And then I would explain the idea to him, and I will probably do rough little, awful, hopeless drawing, and also do a kind of description in words of like, this should be here and this should be there. But I would work with different people in different ways according to what they’re like, and what the particular nature of the particular work is. But by and large I work with people who I know what their work is like, and craftsmen usually have quite a small range, they don’t do things suddenly that are unexpected, and so you can...once you know you can design specifically for them, and like choose a collaborator that suits the particular work. But of course it would be nice if I had five or six people working here all the time under my direct whatever, but that’s economically out of the question.
And do you always work with somebody else because you don’t have the craft training to do it?
No I don’t have the training. I mean, but, if you imagine I began by, well say writing stories and then I wrote plays and then I wrote poems and them I wrote concrete poems, and then when I started the garden I became interested in the possibility of putting text into the garden, and that was like a straightforward idea for inscriptions, but then from working with people I got the idea, perhaps I don’t only do things that Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 7: Tape 4: Side A Page 60 are texts, and I had no craft training at all, and it would have taken years to reach a standard of proficiency that was necessary. And especially in relation to the word things, at this time concrete poetry was quite fashionable, and there was quite a number of exhibitions, and in so far as people used concrete poems, not on the page, the realisations were totally inept, and it was clear to me that these things must be done to the highest possible standard, and mustn’t be any saying, of course this should be like this, or this should be like that. Therefore there’s no good trying to do it yourself, because it would be years before you can do it properly, and the sensible thing is to do it with other people. I mean, it’s not to be supposed that say William Shenstone did the inscriptions which are in the Leasowes, he would be amazed at any such idea, you know. But it was from doing a quite conventional thing of asking people to do lettering that I then moved on, seeing that you could do other things as well. And it began for the garden, but then, when I began to have exhibitions I would do them for other places too.
And do you have a sense of power, I mean that...
(laughs) No.
But, here you are, you don’t leave this land, and yet there are massive great works being carried out in different parts of the world to your specification. I mean this is an extraordinary kind of omnipotence in a sense.
No, and firstly there’s not massive great works, I mean that, next year there will be a book of my permanent works outside in Europe, and there’s quite a lot of them now, but I mean, compared to what I would like to do, there’s nothing...compared to what I could have done if I had had any money, there’s nothing.
What would you have done?
Well, I would have built my Sheffield memorial for a start, and its building. No, I mean, if I don’t know what I would have done it’s because I don’t think about it, because I haven’t the chance of doing it. I would only think about it if I had the chance of doing it. But, no, I mean... First I have daily the experience of the inadequacies of my own talent, which is very humbling, and then secondly I have daily the sense that I can’t get doing what I want to do for lack of the opportunity or the money. I mean of course I like doing the things that...I mean I’m very pleased to have the exhibition in Munich that I’m just about to have, and so on, but, well you Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 7: Tape 4: Side A Page 61 know that, for instance part of the exhibition is the possible reconstruction of the Ehrentempels, and I don’t suppose I will really get to do that, but I would really love to do it. No, I mean my character as a condition is one of great humility and frustration. Oh, occasionally I get a wee bit of pleasure, but mostly it’s a feeling of bafflement, how can I get to do this and how can I get to do that. I mean, I want desperately now to make this little temple at the end of the loch, to shift the column and put this little temple, but, I’ve got the plans now for the temple but I don't suppose I’ll ever be able to find the money. But who knows? I mean I’ll try, I’ll do my best.
And when you first came to Stonypath, did you already know you were going to make a garden here, or did it come with the move to the place?
Well I had begun to be interested in gardens and that a wee bit before, because the place we were at in Easter Ross had a garden in, but that was only a rented place, but I had begun to think about what you could do in gardens. But the fact there’s a garden was because the ground was there, and that represented the possibility of doing the garden, and if I hadn’t been here, I had been somewhere else where there was some other possibility, I would have done something else. I mean, I see my role as being that of the person who sees possibilities, right, like the possibility of holding out against Strathclyde Region, or whatever, whatever. And in this case it was, the ground was the possibility of doing something with it, and so I started.
Did you begin to get interested in what some of the landscape artists had done, the painters, at the time of being interested in gardens?
You mean like Claude Lorrain and people...yes, exactly.
How did they come together?
At the same time. It all kind of came together.
[End of Track 7: Tape 4: Side A] Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 8: Tape 4: Side B Page 62 Track 8: Tape 4: Side B
I mean, it really was like having a kind of vision, that, I mean you can't imagine how ignorant I was and how poor I was. I mean when we had to get a pram for Eck we had to get one that cost 50p or something, fifth-hand. I mean there wasn’t any money at all. And to get a spade was an enormous kind of thing. So it was very very difficult to do it. And also I was totally ignorant. But I was kind of enrapt, there was a feeling, and a kind of vision, like round me, you know, like Titian would paint somebody enrapt in a kind of vision, I was like that. And this incredible ignorance and naivety and poverty, but this vision. And so I just kind of kept on. But it never occurred to me that I would ever have a garden which people would want to come to see, or which would be in any way famous, it absolutely never occurred to me.
And speaking of ignorance, I mean, when I was trying to understand your work, I got very excited because one reference would lead me to another, and you know, for instance, I was re-reading about the French Revolution, which led me to David, and then because of landscape one started reading about Claude. But I realised what I had done, I did actually have a book of David’s paintings that I looked at, but apropos of Claude and some of the others, all I had done was to get excited about the ideas that I had read about rather than at any stage looking at their pictures.
Pictures, yes.
Did you go through a process like that, or what was it?
Yes, but it was difficult, because I wanted to see photos of classical gardens and things, but in those days there were so few, it was really only twenty-five years ago, whatever, but there were so few garden books compared to now. And now there’s an incredible quantity of garden books, every new list from Zwemmer’s has got more garden books in it. But in those days there was hardly anything that you could see at all, and I had great difficulty getting hold of reference material, and of course not having money to buy expensive books too. But, if you persevere, I mean the great thing is to persevere, and bit by bit you can kind of unfold the thing and find the references that you need. And everything else always seems to kind of fit together in a way which you don’t expect at the beginning, like, one thing fits with another thing, and... I mean things often have quite unexpected kind of connections that you don’t think of to begin with, but that emerge, and this is very exciting, because it suggests that they really are there all the time, and I suppose that’s one of the rewarding Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 8: Tape 4: Side B Page 63 feelings that you get, of some kind of rightness or something like that. But, I must say that with the garden, and I’m so aware of what I could have done if I had had more money, what I could do.
Did the French Revolution part come in because of the garden? Did that lead in through that?
Well in a curious way yes, because when I first got the chance to do things outside the garden, not here, I found that to get things done properly, especially in Britain, was very very difficult, and that everybody talked all the time about time and money, and never about quality or aspiration. And, I mean, this was a really very traumatic experience for me, that, to have to argue pathetically about things being done properly, instead of it being assumed by everybody that they would be done properly. And I thought to myself, what’s really needed here is a revolution, a complete different way of approaching it. So, I thought well what revolutions have there been, and the one I had heard most about was really the French Revolution, so I had in the house half of the two Everyman volumes, one of Everyman volumes of Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution. So I started and read it, and I really became very very fascinated by Robespierre and Saint-Just, and I thought, this is a way of thinking that really appeals to me. So I read more about the Revolution, and then of course the whole problem with the Region began, and this whole thing about the secularisation, which, I mean it really...it’s hard to explain, because now it’s sort of just an ordinary part of my life, but at that time it was a great crisis, and I was always having clashes with authority, and trying to get people involved in doing something about what I saw was the crisis of Western culture, you know. And of course they never knew what I was talking about, and, I mean, it was very very extreme. I mean my life is always very extreme in one way or another, but... Another thing that people don’t understand is how much hostility to the garden there was at the beginning, that now almost everybody likes the garden and is pleased with it, but I remember when the first book on the garden was done, a quite modest book was done, in America, called Selected Ponds, and I sent a review copy to the Scottish radio arts programme, and I said, ‘It would be nice if you could review it, but if you are going to be horrible about it, please don’t do it.’ Anyway, they reviewed it, and they really were awful about it, ghastly, I mean, treated the garden as a place of horror really. [listening to sound] It’s a pheasant.
So really they just leapt to conclusions.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 8: Tape 4: Side B Page 64 Well I mean, they just treated the garden as a place of horror. I mean I can’t...I couldn’t understand the attitude at all. Like, they took great exception to the Nuclear Sail work.
Because it had the word ‘nuclear’?
I suppose so. And they took great exception to the panzer leader tortoises, and...they described all the upright inscriptions as tombstones. I mean, the person who wrote it is a quite leading Scottish elderly poet, and I can only conclude that he had never encountered classical culture in his life, and had never known that the Romans put inscriptions into gardens. But this of course is a feature of our time, that everything that is traditional is treated as esoteric, or bizarre, or whatever; I mean it’s very strange. And, this was all very painful for me, I mean making the garden with such difficulties and then to be treated with all this abuse of it. But nobody remembers this now, because the garden’s really quite widely approved of, but it really was very unpleasant what had to be endured at the beginning.
And some of that sort of extremity that you have had to go through, I mean, it’s there in the figures of Robespierre and Saint-Just isn’t it. I mean, even when they are here together in one garden, they’re still very isolated figures, because you could have no friends in their situations, you had to be rigorous.
Yes, I mean, of course rigour is a sore point. I mean I'm all in favour of rigour. You know, on the back of the Abrioux book there’s the copy from the Piranesi, in which I have inserted the inscription that says, ‘When the world took to tolerance it took to crime,’ which everybody found shocking, but I mean it’s absolutely true, that... I mean one of the crucial events in my life was my dispute with Fulcrum Press, which you won’t know about, but took place many many many many years ago, and in brief, at this time Fulcrum Press was a small press run by an ambitious person in London called Stuart Montgomery, and he wanted really to have all the sort of avant-garde new British poets, and as many American ones as possible, under contract to him. And I had this book called The Dancers Inherit the Party, which had already appeared in two editions, and he asked could he do it again, and I said yes. And after I had signed the contract, he told me was going to describe it as a first edition, and I said, ‘Well it’s not a first edition, it’s a third edition, and it’s not truthful to say it’s a first edition.’ And he just laughed, and indicated he was going to go ahead. And he had an ACGB grant, so I wrote to the ACGB and I said that it’s not right that public money should be used to produce a fake first edition. And they wrote back very very Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 8: Tape 4: Side B Page 65 rudely to me, saying in effect, mind your own business. And I appealed then to the other poets, and they were either published with Montgomery and wanted to stay friends with him, or wished to be published by him and wanted to stay friends with him, so they all took a very disapproving attitude and said to me it’s not nice to quarrel, and things like this. And then I appealed to the Scottish Arts Council, which I had my book on the shortlist for a prize some years before, which surely must know it couldn’t be now a first edition, and they told me that if London says it’s a first edition, then it must be a first edition. And then I appealed to the ombudsman through my MP, and he went to the British Museum – not the British Museum...yes, the British Museum, and the British Museum said that I was correct, that the book couldn’t be a first edition. But they also said that they weren’t going to make any public statement to that effect, and they weren’t going to do anything about it. So, I appealed to a thing called the Association of Little Presses, and they wrote me a letter which said, ‘You are selfishly spoiling a good racket.’ And so it went on. And after, I suppose about five years or something, by this time nobody was speaking to me at all, I was completely isolated, but it was clear to me that I shouldn’t be made to take part in a fraud that I didn’t want to take part in, and also that it was so difficult to make a book properly that to deliberately to set out to make it wrongly, was absolutely deplorable. I mean, it went against everything that I could feel or think. So in the end I went to the Trading Standards, Consumer Protection Department in Glasgow, in Strathclyde, and it happened that the second head, effectively the man who took the decisions, was a very nice man called Mr Girdwood[ph], who had been in the Boys Brigade, and who was quite a keen Baptist Christian. So he came to see me and he was a very upright kind of person, a very nice man. He had been a detective before. Anyway, he said, ‘Well the book is either a first edition or it isn’t,’ he said. So I said, ‘Well this is what I’ve been trying to tell the culture for five years, and nobody understands.’ So he said, ‘Well I’ll go into Smith’s and buy it, and then we’ll send it to Sotheby’s.’ So he did this, and Sotheby’s said, you know, it can’t be a first edition. And so he took the publisher to court, and the court ruled that the book wasn’t a first edition, and then the publisher then withdrew the book, because he saw that I could raise a similar action in every consumer protection department in every town in the country where the book was sold. And then, I asked the ACGB to correct their position and they refused to do it, but, I don’t know what happened, there was some internal kind of revolution or something. Anyway, in the end they sent an emissary off with a briefcase, and he had a draft letter which said that they were sorry, and that I had been correct. And I said, ‘Well that’s quite agreeable to me.’ And then, the SAC was to sign it as well, and they refused for another six months, to sign it. So it took eight years in all. And, I was never forgiven. That was when Lord Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 8: Tape 4: Side B Page 66 Goodman was in charge of the ACGB. And I was never forgiven, it was always remembered that I had done this terrible thing. I mean, I don’t know what you can say.
It’s particularly surprising with a lawyer at the top of them that he wouldn’t have gone for exactitude.
Well, but then, I mean he’s just written this autobiography hasn’t he, and the reviews all say what a nice man he was, and then the instance of these stories, which seem to me to show not a nice man. Like for instance, there’s one story was told very approvingly in, was it the TLS, somewhere I read anyway, that the police had searched Bacon’s studio and found drugs or something, and Bacon had just phoned up Goodman and Goodman had phoned up the police, and then all the thing was quietly dropped. Well that seems to me to be deplorable, quite deplorable. And then, it was clear that he had acted exactly in the same way in my case, that this publisher was in London on an ACGB grant, and I was a wee bloke on a Scottish hillside, so who was I? So, that’s it.
And, we started this story because I was talking about the rigour of Robespierre.
Yes. And the rigour seems to me...well, I mean one works one hopes with some rigour; I mean it’s not a dirty word. And when rigour becomes a crime, as it has become in our culture, then people wonder why they can’t get a plumber to repair their tap properly, or whatever, but it’s not fair, because I mean, the bus driver who drives without rigour is prosecuted, but the...you know, in the case I told you about with my book, the National Library of Scotland had refused to make any statement, and of course they continued to demand free copies of my publications from me, so I didn’t give them to them any more, so now they have to buy them.
But in terms of being let down by people, in your life, like this, do you feel closer in a sense to the absent presences in your garden?
Well yes, I mean I regard Robespierre and Saint-Just as great chums if that’s what you mean, absolutely, yes, yes. But of course, I mean I’ve been very loyally supported, or befriended, by many people too. But in this case I was really let down by a culture which showed itself completely unable to understand the difference between right and wrong, and this was amazing to me, but very very instructive. I mean, this is exactly of course what Rousseau said about culture, but it’s very sad and terrible. Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 8: Tape 4: Side B Page 67
But it’s also, I keep going back to it, that sort of isolation. I mean one of the other pieces of yours that I really loved was the three watering cans, and the way that image fits in again, it’s like the drummer boy, it’s just superb in that it fits and everything.
Yes.
But in a sense, I mean there’s obviously a unity in the sense that they are represented by the same object.
Yes.
But also, they are very separate from one another.
Yes.
And their fate is to be watering cans, as well as everything else, and of course, there’s that wonderful sense of the neck and the vulnerability of it.
Yes.
But even though they're together, you have that sense. Maybe it’s because of the history. I mean every man goes to the guillotine by himself.
Yes.
So there is that sense of isolation.
Yes, but, I mean, in my case isolation is a funny thing, because I never...in a sense I’m quite accustomed to it and in one sense expect it, but in another sense I don’t expect it, because I feel a great solidarity with culture. I mean, it always surprises me when people don’t support me in my battles, because, if I think that the battle is on a principle and that I am correct, my assumption is that everybody will support me: well not me but the principle, and it amazes me when they don’t; I mean that they would find...they reduce everything to a personal, like in the Fulcrum thing, it’s not nice to quarrel, but the fact that it wasn’t nice to fake an edition didn’t seem to enter their heads. Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 8: Tape 4: Side B Page 68
And is that plaque in the garden – this is a bad paraphrase so forgive me – that says words to the effect of, sometimes you think people are the same as you, but it’s always wrong.
I don’t know this work.
It’s after the Henry Vaughan.
Sometimes you think people are the same as you, but it’s always wrong?
I said it was a bad paraphrase. It’s to do, I think, with believing yourself to be understood, and feeling that there’s a possibility that... Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 8: Tape 4: Side B Page 69 I can’t identify the work. I can’t identify the work at all.
Well, come out.
[end of session]
[End of Track 8: Tape 4: Side B] Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Page 70 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A
[sound of heavy rain on roof]
Have you any idea what today’s date is?
I think it might be the 16th or the 15th. I can easily look and see, do you want me to see? I’ll have to go, and I’m wired up.
No. Do you know which month it is?
Yes.
Which?
I said, now you’re asking.
Well I told you it was going to be rigorous.
September.
And the year?
’77.
’77?
’97.
[break in recording]
Don’t let me hear too much of me, I’m not going to speak any more at all.
Yes, I know, it’s horrid isn’t it. Since we were just talking off the tape about playwrights and, I just wondered, one of the things I was going to ask you was, whether you admire or dislike or have strong feelings about Tony Harrison’s work.
Is that the poet? Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Page 71
Yes.
Isn’t that one a poet called that, that goes to the north of England and writes rhymes and things.
Newcastle.
Yes, I think, I always find him quite crude really, not very subtle, but it’s something of a puzzle to me why he’s so famous. I mean I could think of dozens of poets who are much better than him.
Contemporary poets?
Yes.
Who would you go for?
Well, not necessarily people who my heart is for, but from the point of view of excellence, professionalism, Louis Zukofsky in America, certainly Robert Creeley also; Auden. I could go on endlessly really. I always found, I have a little book of translations from early Greek poems, and there’s some Tony Harrison in it, and when I... [Sorry, could you just give it a good bash.]
[break in recording]
A common one of his, I always thought really that it was quite ordinary, not a very subtle use of language, not very skilled.
Have you seen any of his things he did on the television?
No, I deliberately didn’t, because I just didn’t want to.
And, one of the other sort of general questions I was going to ask you, given the time we’re in at the moment, I wondered what you felt about the Scottish devolution vote.
Well obviously, my postie is absolutely delighted, really delighted, he’s not stopped smiling since. But I told him to win 3 to 1; it’s kind of almost ignominious, I mean if Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Page 72 it had been Poland or somewhere we’d have had a ninety-eight per cent turnout and a ninety-seven per cent yes vote. But of course I’m pleased because had it been a no vote it would have been just a disaster for the feeling in the country for the culture, for everything. So I’m pleased.
And what do you think it will actually mean?
Well who knows what it will actually mean really, because there’s now this interregnum isn’t there, before the thing actually takes place, and who knows what will happen in that intervening time, we just don’t know at all. But it’s certainly clear from another recent event that the history or whatever has become very volatile suddenly, so you can’t really say what will happen.
But ideally...
But I mean I would like of course if Scotland was completely independent.
Why?
Just a question of honour, that we’re not bound to a country which is independent, or else noticeably enslaved so that there can be a kind of proper resistance movement or something like that. But preferably that the country should be independent. But this is obvious really isn’t it.
But in a sort of practical day-to-day sense, what would you like to see as the impact of becoming independent?
Well I think it would be good for Scotland to have to behave in a more responsible way and stop gunning all the time in the way that Scotland does, I think that’s very very bad to get into the habit of blaming everything on England, but without even taking the responsibility for that situation. But you know, I don’t have...I mean obviously I’m very Scottish and very much in favour of Scotland being independent and all of that, but as regards my actual life, I mean I don’t have much of a place in Scottish culture at all, so I don’t suppose it will make that much difference to me. I mean I heard Joy Hendry, you know, the lady in Scotland, in Edinburgh who edits a magazine which I can’t remember the name of, anyway she said on the radio I think it was, or no, it was the telly, that it would be very important for Scotland to have its own parliament so that Scottish writers and artists could become known in Europe. I Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Page 73 think that’s quite a strange thing to say. I mean, I’ve managed to become known in Europe; I’m better known in Europe than in Scotland.
Despite Scotland, yes.
Yes. I mean I don’t know what she meant by that, but it’s a kind of characteristic of Scotland, a thing that doesn’t seem to have occurred to them if maybe the artists were better they would be dominating Europe.
Did you always feel Scottish?
Yes, always. But it’s never been an issue with me because it’s so clear that I’m Scottish, and I never had to prove it or argue about it or worry about it, beyond of course wanting the country to be independent, but I never went in for this agonised thing, like, am I a Scottish poet or am I a Scottish this or am I Scottish that? It’s always been quite clear to me.
Were both your parents Scottish?
Yes, both my parents were Scottish.
And did they live... I mean I know your father was on a boat at one point, but did they, were they effectively rooted in Scotland all their lives?
Yes, my father, my father came from, there’s a famous, architecturally famous house near Edinburgh called Hopetoun House, which is a big estate and everything, and my grandfather was in charge of the sawmill there, and my father was born there in a wee cottage, and, I feel quite connected with that place, and my father, though he left and everything, went to Nassau and America and so on, was really very Scottish, and connected with that place. Also I should think that that was my first unconscious connection with neo-classicism, because my uncle was nightwatchman in the big house as it was called, and I used to sometimes walk around..... [break in recording] .....the grounds with me sometimes, or else I would walk up to the big house with him, and it was this kind of Neoclassical architecture and these big lawns and deer and all this kind of thing that’s quite familiar to me now as a kind of eighteenth century sort of thing.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Page 74 And was there somebody living in the house, was it a working house in that sense?
Mostly I remember it as being empty when he would go and look. I don’t even know who owned it at that time, but of course the estate went on working, there was gamekeepers and so on and so on, and at the foot... My auntie stayed, where my father was born there was this wee two cottages like together on the edge of a kind of meadow, and there was a dovecote, pigeon house, just outside the garden, at the foot, so there was a constant kind of sound, like here in summer, of pigeons, bring on this lovely silvery sound, and a water butt with fallen honeysuckle petals floating in it, and my uncle grew vegetables, there was a nice vegetable garden. And my auntie always cooked bacon and fried oatmeal and things like this. It was very very Scottish. And in the next door house there was a family with two beautiful girls with long long red hair like out of Walter Scott or something, and a beautiful kind of retriever dog also with long long red hair. And then just a wee bit away, fifty yards away, something between a house and a castle, which might have been in the first chapter of Stevenson’s Kidnapped, like a really ancient kind of Scottish house which you enter through a kind of ruined stone arch. And this house must have been six or seven storeys high and probably was at one time lived in by very posh people like in the seventeenth century or something, but now a very poor family lived in it, one of those poor families with ever so many children all with runny noses running around, and who had a swing in the middle of the wood that I was allowed to go on. And the father of these girls with their beautiful red hair, on holidays he wore a frock-coat which would be identical in design I suppose to the coat that Robespierre was guillotined in, and obviously he just regarded it as his best suit or whatever, but when I look back on it, it really belonged to another age that had swallowed him. So it was all very Scottish, and I consider that to be my background. And there’s a wee graveyard near there where my sister, who is in Canada, has bought a grave, and she says that I can be buried in this grave if I want to.
And do you?
Well at the moment I’m really not looking forward to being buried at all, but insofar as it’s a kind of necessity, yes I would quite like to be buried there I think, yes.
And when you were exploring it as a child, were you very solitary? You sound as though you were, as though you weren’t with your sister or with anyone.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Page 75 No, it wasn’t a big house, so usually we would go, me, I would go, or my sister would go, and we used to go at the same time, but my great interest in going there was trout fishing and there was a wee burn went past the sawmill where my grandfather had been in charge, and I think this was probably not fished with it being on an estate, and I used to, I asked the keeper, could I be allowed to fish, and there were very nice trout in it and that was my great thing of being there, I would be away fishing all day.
Did you know your grandfather, or not?
No, he was already dead.
Do you know any stories about him, do you know what he was like?
No, I never heard any stories about him. I imagine he was probably quite severe. But the other thing I remember about the house was that they had a wee tiny front room or best room which nobody ever really went in, and there was a glass fronted bookcase with books in it with like, Tom Brown’s Schooldays and Sir Walter Scott, and books like this, and so I mean this also made quite a big impression on me. I can remember it clearly this wee front room, and the feeling of these books, and it must be there that I read Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Anyway, all very Scottish.
And did you know anything much about your father’s growing up there, do you know what it was like for him?
No, I don’t, I never really heard very much about it at all, no. No no, there was no great thing about family myths or anything like that.
Did you get the impression that he would have spent his time there a bit like you, that he would have enjoyed the same things you enjoyed, or were you very different?
Well we were very different in a way, but I mean now I see a lot of my father in myself. I mean I never would have thought so before. Of course I remember also my uncle, and he died not really very old, and he’d been in the Navy in the First World War and I think he fought at Jutland, so this all, like, thing from what is now another time, but in those days it didn’t really seem like another time.
Would he have told you anything about the battles?
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Page 76 No, it was not like Darling Buds of May or something, it was all quite cosy but quite taciturn, very cosy, the smell of the frying oatmeal, and the stone floor of the kitchen, and the water butt with the petals in it, and the pigeons. All very very cosy, but I don’t remember any great conversations or anything like that. And I suppose also that, I see now that people living on an estate, they do cultivate a kind of reticence or whatever, because when I stayed in Perthshire in a wee cottage on a similar estate, it was very, I mean everybody was very hodden doun as we would say by the presence of owner.
What’s the phrase?
Hodden doun.
How do you spell it?
I’ve no idea. H-o-d-d-e-n, held down, like, very very feudal. I mean, this was after I came out of the Army, and I remember the gamekeeper came to the door and, you never got called by your own name, you were called by the name of your house, and he came in and he said, ‘I want you for the beating, Drumlekiel[ph]’ Well I didn’t go, but this was what life had been...
This is grouse beating?
Yes, as, someone who stayed in the estate you were expected to go and beat for the gentry, you would have got ten shillings a day or something like this. But it was all very, yes, feudal, and there were little paths where those who worked on the estate were supposed to, when one of the gentry appeared you were supposed to go down these little paths and hide until the gentry had gone past. And the lady owner, she was reputed, probably the case, to have a mirror in her bedroom that looked down the road so that when the children came home from school they were supposed to walk straight up the road to the wee cottages without playing, and if they were seen playing or anything she would complain. You cannot imagine how feudal it was.
And did you accept it, or did you rebel?
No, I, to some extent, rebelled. I mean I went working at the tatty planting, and at this time I suppose the post-war Labour Government was in power probably. Anyway there was a minimum wage, and we were paid less than the minimum wage, so I Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Page 77 complained, nobody else complained, but they said to me something like, ‘Don’t complain, things could be done to you’. And what this in fact meant was that part of the arrangement was that I got the tractor once a month or something to take coal up to my cottage, and also what was called brock, which was frosted potatoes that you could nevertheless boil and feed to your hens, so I would get a bag or two of brock as well, so they meant that if you complain you won’t get these things. That would be quite serious for you.
And was there any sense that there might have been a unity among people and that they might have rebelled or...?
Oh no, everybody was worried about their job, and, the atmosphere was really just quite, quite feudal. I was very good friends with a shepherd and I used to go and see them, and they would all be very conscious of living near the big house and how you had to behave, and so on, and the keepers were very…there was a certain feeling that you might quite easily get shot in the woods, by sort of accident but, there was a feeling that there would be no great effort made not to shoot you if you were someone that they thought that you shouldn’t be. But it was like, kind of, when I read the stories of Erskine Caldwell, I don’t know if you’ve ever read him, he’s a writer from the Thirties, quite famous in the Thirties and Forties, he wrote about the Deep South in America, and it was really like a kind of equivalent of the Deep South, but quite exciting too because of this tremendous kind of atmosphere, very wild and stark. And the little village was three or four miles away and it was kind of at the foot of hills which really looked like mountains, and a river ran through it, and there would be kind of one of everything. There was The Thief, and the this, the that, The Mole- catcher, like, everybody would like be in capital letters. And I was very friendly with The Thief, and he was quite...usually, he was always getting arrested and put in prison, but on one occasion he actually denied having done it, and he was very very upset, and he got convicted and put into Peterhead, and he wrote letters back to the lady he stayed with expressing very deep upset. So I went to see, I went to Glasgow to see Sir George MacLeod, who was the head of the Iona Community and a kind of very [inaudible] minister and public figure, and much given to concern about the working class and so on. So, and he went up to Peterhead and saw Dave and, he wasn’t able to get Dave out but this getting visited by Sir George McLeod made Dave feel that all was well again. Also he slipped Dave twenty cigarettes, so it was what Dave called a proper gentleman.
How did you see him, was he easy to see? Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Page 78
Yes, not difficult to see, I phoned him up and went to his house. Of course in those days I was quite, very poor, and quite ragged, and so on. But no, he was very nice to me, I stayed the weekend with him, and... Though undoubtedly it did Dave a lot of good that this person had paid attention to him, but the definition was a proper gentleman. And there was also this other person, other family who worked in another big, with another big house that was outside this estate, and they had some very posh kind of dog, and this man, this worker, told me that this dog was a proper gentleman too. [laughing] He thought I was very keen on people being proper gentlemen.
Do you know what the dog had done to achieve this?
I think his general ambience, like, he had earned this epithet, yes. And I used to also, I wrote letters for the people in the village who couldn’t really...they could write but they couldn’t write official letters, so when they got into trouble and things I would write the letters for them, or else go to see the minister for them.
So you were somewhere in between; you weren’t part of, a landowner, and you weren’t quite part of them?
Well I certainly wasn’t part of the land-owning class, that was absolutely clear. No, I mean, I wrote, there was a time when I was writing stories and things, and I mean usually I wrote in the morning or whatever, and in the afternoon I worked at whatever piecework I could get, like lifting turnips or spreading dung, or whatever, whatever.
And when you didn’t go and beat the grouse or whatever, was there a penalty for that?
No there wasn’t any penalty for that, but I suspect I was the first person who had ever, you know, like I was the first person here I think who had ever stood up against the warrant sale you know, sort of thing. But there was no immediate retribution with that, you know.
And so, just really from infancy you had been aware of the sort of class division?
Who could live in Britain and not be aware of class divisions? I mean, it is a...yes, it’s a sad, sad thing about Britain.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Page 79 Might it have been partly that kind of feudal atmosphere that made your father get out? I mean, do you know why he did?
No, no no no, I don’t know why my father went abroad, to Nassau, but it wouldn’t be that, because he would have taken that for granted, for that generation. Oh no, it wouldn’t be that. I don’t know why he...
Maybe he had done something awful and had to leave.
No no, that’s being romantic. No no, nothing like that either I don’t think. Much more probable that he knew somebody who was out there who said come, or, let’s go, or, it would be something like that I would think.
And what did he actually go out there to do?
I don’t know what he went out there to do, but I know what he did.
Which was what?
Smuggle. It was the Prohibition time, I mean the Prohibition began and he bought or hired a schooner and ran the liquor up to, off, somewhere off North America, I don’t know where.
For a while, or just once?
Oh no, no, I think till the Prohibition ended. No he made a lot of money and stayed in a very very big house, a really big house next door to Government House. Yes.
And do you remember being there? I know you were born there but...
Yes. No no, I remember clearly. I remember being on the schooner, I remember being seasick on this schooner. I remember being dumped on the top of the hatch, left there, and feeling really wobbly with the motion of the boat.
So your experience of ships isn’t entirely a happy one?
No, no at all. But I think it was also, I had happy bits too, and, there was a lot to do with boats there, the native fishing boats used to come in and we used to go and buy Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Page 80 fish from them, and there were other sort of racing boats in front of the hotel, and the sea. And I remember my father had a small boat in the garden that I used to play on all the time, it was sort of propped up. And, yes, it was much to do with boats there. He used to go fishing. I think I used to fish with Hemingway he told me. But you have to remember that this was long ago when it wasn’t all so touristy and everything as now, that they used to go to an island called Bimini and I think that’s where he fished with Hemingway and he caught those great big swordfish and things like that. But I remember it clearly, and also I remember being in one hurricane, or two hurricanes, and having in the middle of the hurricanes a thing called a lull when it all stops for, I don’t know, a certain period, and then starts again. And we had to leave our house and I remember walking down the street over, all the telegraph poles were down, and the wires, and the walls were down, and we went to these people who must have had a stronger house, or maybe a stone house or something like this. I remember getting put into bed and disgracing myself with picking a hole in the mosquito net, for which I got into trouble.
And if you got into trouble, what happened?
I can’t remember but I remember this feeling of having got into trouble.
So do you think you were thumped, or not?
I doubt it, I really doubt that. I don’t think that my family went in for that. Occasional spanking with a hairbrush but not much actual thumping.
In a quite controlled way.
Yes.
And would it have mattered to you that you were in trouble?
Oh yes, it didn’t…I don’t like the feeling of being guilty. No no, it’s very easy to make me guilty.
Is it?
Yes, you could try it now and you will probably succeed very well.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Page 81 Were you given a religious upbringing, was part of it to do with religion?
Well everybody in my time was given. When I was at boarding you had to go to church of course every Sunday and to Sunday school.
Was that Church of England? You weren’t Catholic were you?
No no. Church of Scotland.
Sorry.
[End of Track 9: Tape 5: Side A] Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Page 82
Track 10: Tape 5: Side B
Do you think some of the guilt came from that sort of formal religious way of thinking, or not?
I don’t really know, just, it’s quite easy to make people feel guilty I think.
But I suppose the other side of the question was, did it matter to you that your father or mother thought well of you? I mean it was presumably they that were angry with you.
Well I wasn’t that much with them you see, because my mother disapproved of my father’s smuggling, and they must have had great rows about it I think, and she thought it was a very improper thing to do. So she left him and took me back to Scotland, I don’t know what age I would have been, but, I could only be four or, four- and-a-half or, something, I can’t really remember. But then later I suppose maybe Prohibition ended and his nefarious activities had to come to an end, so she went back out there, but I was left at boarding school, so I didn’t really see a great deal of them, they didn’t come back till, maybe four years or something like that.
And do you remember finding that very hard?
Yes, boarding school was really terrible. I have friends... I was at Dollar and I have friends now who were at Dollar, but some time after me, but it was a very very fierce school, I mean you got belted all the time, really, I remember being terrified most of the time. But one of my friends told me that a lot of boys there were sent back from the East, like from Scottish parents, and his first day at boarding school he told me, he was very very cold because he had just come from Hong Kong or somewhere into the middle of a Scottish winter, so he climbed up onto the top of the radiator. This was his first day. Anyway, he got found in this position and got a very severe belting for it. I think it’s really terrible, but this was what it was like.
And what was the school like in Nassau? You said you went to school a bit there. Was that very different?
Sorry?
You said you went to school in Nassau for a bit, did you? Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Page 83
Just a kind of infants’ school thing which I don’t remember anything about except being in the garden at break time.
So it wasn’t a bad experience?
No no, it wasn’t a bad experience, no.
And had your mother met your father in Scotland and gone out with him, or did she meet him out there?
Yes, no no, she met him here.
And where was she from, what sort of…?
She came from another kind of family, an urban family, and her father was head manager or something of the railway, and there were numerous children and they were brought up quite strictly, but also with a great sense of their father having done well. Because I remember when I was at boarding school I used to spend holidays with my auntie, and we were going, she stayed in St Andrews but we were going up to Nairn to be with my cousins for the holiday, and, you had to change trains, and the clerk had given her...made a mistake so that we missed our train, and I remember her saying to the porter, ‘This would never have happened when my father was head of the railway’. [laughing] With great seriousness and haughtiness.
What did she look like?
Just like an auntie, with grey hair, and, she was very sweet to me when I didn’t have my parents, you know, I always liked staying with her.
What did your mother look like?
Very pretty with dark hair, very Scottish-looking. But she had, though she came from this urban family, in the war she was a Land Girl, so she was not unacquainted with fields and such things, yes.
And do you think, I mean obviously she didn’t like your father being a smuggler, but do you think otherwise they were quite compatible, or...? Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Page 84
No, I think they were totally incompatible really, very sad to me, they were totally incompatible. I don’t know why but they were just totally incompatible.
And do you think you were aware of that from very early on?
Yes, very, very early on, yes.
And when you say you can see bits of your father in yourself now, what do you mean?
Well a kind of country thing really. I think I’m quite kind of Scottish country in many ways, and, like that. And, I don’t really, I can’t explain it but I often, I often think to myself, why am I giving this imitation of my father when he was elderly? And then I think, well I’m not really giving an imitation of him, I’m just doing it. It’s kind of very familiar and a wee bit worrying.
And do you see that when you are in relation to another person, or do you see it just going about your daily life?
Just going about my daily life, not in relation to anybody else, no. No.
And is there any sort of action that you make that seems to be his?
[pause] I don’t know. A certain, in spite of my predilection for the French Revolution and so on and so on, a certain kind of conservatism. You will have heard of Richard Demarco, and, he’s quite amusing to me too, because for the world he has this very liberal stance, but when he gets alone with me, not because he recognises something in me anyway, he tends to hold forth with moral disquisitions of great length, and expressing very conservative viewpoints. He’ll say things like, ‘Homosexuals should not be allowed to have their own clubs,’ he’ll say. [laughing] And other things that if he was to say them generally it would cause consternation, but I think he feels quite safe saying them to me. Not that I would express such an opinion, but I think he maybe recognises in me some sort of thing, you know. Maybe, maybe the Italian thing is a wee bit like the Scottish in someway, I don’t know. I know that one of his great worries is when he gives public speeches, being heckled by his auntie, that seems to me to be a very Scottish situation. [laughing]
And she’s a good heckler? Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Page 85
She’ll be sitting near the back I imagine, yes.
But what do you feel you are conservative about?
Well obviously I’m two completely different things, but I feel quite conservative about my more outré aspects I suppose, and quite disapproving of the improper way that I behave you could say, something like that.
Which bit do you think is improper?
Oh you’re not allowed to ask questions like that. No no, I can’t answer things like that. But I have lots of improper aspects, and I can’t, I can’t approve of them really.
Can we be a bit specific? Because what I would want to make sure is that we don’t end up with somebody listening to this in a hundred years’ time, deciding which bits of what they know about you they think are improper. Just give me some ideas. I’m really anxious that this reflects you and as far as possible is as clear as it can be.
Well, you could say that I get into dark troubles through being inordinately fond of lassies, which it would be better if I wasn’t, but it is so and that’s it. And of course I do other things that sometimes in the middle of the night I’m aghast about. I mean, maybe... There’s very little things in my past that I can feel comfortable about in the middle of the night. I mean for example, when I...I left school, normally I left school at fourteen, was when you were allowed to leave school, but really I left school when I was evacuated because I never properly went back to school again, and then when I left school I went to work in a job, in...but maybe I told you this before.
That you turned up late day after day after day.
Yes.
Yes.
This, and I can’t, I really cannot approve of such behaviour, it’s really, really dreadful behaviour. And also, things like getting a job and then staying till lunchtime and then leaving.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Page 86 But just to make clear, what you are not talking about, I mean, we’ll get on to it later because I want to make sure we’ve got your words on it, but you know, things like the battles with the Region or the battles with the French...
No no, I’ve no...
You’re not talking about that, are you?
No bad conscious about those things at all. The only thing is that when I look back on it, I sometimes think, how did I do that? How I had the panache to do it. Because I’m older and tireder now. But as regards having stood up to those people, no, I have no, no qualms about that at all.
And do you look at all like your father?
Yes, very like him, very like him. Somebody recently sent me a drawing of me they’d done, sort of, from memory, and when I saw it I thought, goodness, they’ve drawn my father, and then I realised they thought they had drawn me, but it was exactly like my father.
And were you aware of it as a child, that you were similar in that way?
Well I didn’t really see him very much you see, this is the thing.
Things like, were your eyes the same colour, and that kind of thing?
I don’t know. I don’t know. No, I saw very little in a way of my parents.
Did you think he was fond of you?
Yes they were very fond of me, both of them. And that’s one thing I do feel bad about really, being such a worry to them. Well through doing things like getting a new job and then leaving it at lunchtime because I didn’t fancy it, things like that are very worrying to parents.
It’s better than being a smuggler perhaps.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Page 87 Well, I don’t mind him having been a smuggler. Anyway, everyone was doing it then, it was probably quite a proper thing to do. I don’t think he shot anybody or anything like that.
And when Prohibition was over, what did he do instead?
Well then he bought a farm in Florida, and this turned out to be a great mistake because, as far as I can understand it, the way the farming there is that, a lot of people lose their crops through frost and things, a gamble, but if you get your crop you get a lot of money, but he lost his crops three years running or something, he lost all his money, so he came back to Scotland really destitute, and had to work as a labourer and things like that.
And do you remember meeting him again at that point?
Yes, I remember going to the boat, the liner, to meet my mother, my sister and my father.
Where was that, where did you go?
Glasgow.
And how old would you have been by this time?
I don’t know. But I was very touched, you know, to see them again. But of course I had to leave boarding school because they lost their money.
But seeing family you haven’t seen for ages can make you feel terribly shy can’t it?
Yes, I was quite shy, and especially a bit shy about my sister. But I also was really very pleased, because I had been very lonely without them, and, I don’t know how many years it was but it seemed to me a long time.
And your sister was younger?
Younger, two years younger.
So that’s why she stayed with them. Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Page 88
So that was why she stayed.
Because that must have been quite hard as well, knowing that there was one child there and one child here.
Yes, it was a bit hard, but of course it was the done thing for the boy to be sent to boarding school, it was just...
And when you met up with them again, did it become easy quite quickly, did they become familiar?
No, it was very sad because they hadn’t any money and they were used to having money, and I couldn’t really bear it. I mean, to talk about it is very difficult for me, it caused me so much pain. First my mother was so embittered, and, I suppose was always thinking about her father being head of the railway.
Did you meet him, did you meet her parents?
No, they were dead too. And, yes we lived in a very poor place, and...
Where did you live?
Oh just in Glasgow, but in very poor rooms, you know, and having been used to being quite well off it was very difficult for them and quite difficult for me, because at boarding school, it was quite a posh sort of school I’d been at, and when I went to the ordinary school in... At boarding school I was always fairly clever and came second or third in the class and things, but when I went to school in Glasgow I couldn’t understand anything, I couldn’t understand anything at all, and everyone spoke this strange language with these words that I’d never heard before, a whole lot of culture to do with ‘back greens’ and back... They stayed in tenements, and each had their little back green and fill it with a dustbin, and you hung the washing there, and, there was a whole vocabulary that was totally unfamiliar to me. And I just got, I was just totally lost, I couldn’t understand anything, and never passed any exams or anything.
When you were at the boarding school, were there things that had really gripped you, had you got very interested?
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Page 89 No, we just got battered all the time, so you had to learn things there. I mean when you think of education now, you couldn’t imagine what it was like. I mean our class teacher at the boarding school wore his belt around his neck like a minister’s collar, and then he would, when you were learning history, 1603 Union of the Crown, 1604 Hampton Court, 1605 Gunpowder Plot, et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera. He would beat time on the desk with his strap, and if you made any mistakes, say in spelling, you got beaten, and very often then you got beaten in your own boarding house for having got beaten. It was really like a reign of terror. But equally clearly some boys thrived on it, but I didn’t, I really was miserable. But then when I learned, I mean, that I was clever, I got good marks and things; I think Glasgow I began getting marks like two per cent.
And you think that was because of language or do you think it was actually that you were just paralysed?
I felt completely alien, alien, paralysed, I felt completely alienated, as you would say now. I just felt completely out of my depth. So when I got evacuated to the country at the start of the war, to me it was just wonderful deliverance, absolutely wonderful deliverance.
Had you done Latin at the boarding school?
No, I hadn’t got to the stage of doing Latin, I would have started the Latin the next year, but I started it in Glasgow because I went into the A class through my marks at the other school, and, I just couldn’t understand it at all, I couldn’t understand why some words ended in um and some words ended in a and so on and so on. It was quite beyond me.
And when you were at the boarding school, was there anyone who was supportive of you, was there either a child or any of the teachers, was there anyone?
No, I had...I was not without friends, in fact, I think it was last year my friend Alison, who had been at Dollar also but twenty years or something after me, she sent me the Dollar magazine, and here was a letter from this boy that had been in my dormitory saying what he had done in the war, he had been a glider pilot, what he did now and all this, and he wrote, ‘And my best friend was Ian Hamilton Finlay.’ And I had never been in touch with him since.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Page 90 But you remember him, he was your friend?
I remember, yes, I remembered him, but, fancy he wrote it after, I suppose it would have been 1933 or ’34 or something like this.
And did you write to him?
I did write to him, but I haven’t had an answer and I fear he may have died or something, yes. But I had to write to him after that, yes.
And it was too sort of terrifying to...
Sorry?
It was too terrifying there to do any rebelling there was it? I mean you were...
Well we spent all our time planning to run away, all our time. I don’t think anybody ever did run away, but we made these great fantasies about running away. I think that was our main subject of discussion.
And, it was presumably in holiday times there that you went to your aunt, was it?
Yes, yes.
So, the freedom must have been extraordinary.
Oh the cosiness and the affection, and being comfy. You know, at boarding school you worked all day, then you got taken for kind of a governed walk for an hour, then you had tea, then you did your prep, and at seven or eight, seven or something, you went to bed. You weren’t allowed to talk in bed, if you got caught talking in bed you got belted. Horrid starched sheets. Everything was... There was only one, briefly, one mistress came, and she used to come in to the dormitory sometimes when the lights were out and she would stroke people’s heads, and everybody used to shout, ‘Me Miss, Me Miss.’ [laughing] But she didn’t last long, she was only there about a couple of months.
And do you think she was doing that because she realised what a rough time you were all having, or what was it? Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Page 91
I think she was just kind.
And when you had memories of your parents in Nassau, when you were reunited with them, I mean were they parents who cuddled you, were they warm towards you?
Yes, well, I wouldn’t say that they cuddled you a great deal, but they were kind parents, yes they were very kind parents. But they were so unhappy between each other that...
Did they stay together?
Yes, till the end, but always on the point of not staying together.
And did their fortunes get any better, or not?
Not really, no. No.
And, I mean when your sister came back you must hardly have known her.
No I didn’t know her at all.
And did you become close to each other at all, or not?
I was very pleased for about one day, and then I hated her. I remember, because we were staying with my cousins at the very first bit, I had to sleep in the same bed as her, and I thought this was going to be very cosy, and then I hated her and she hated me, and a pillow had to be put between us because of the hatred.
And was it jealousy, or what was it?
I don’t know. Just hatred.
And how do you feel about her now?
Oh, fine really, quite fond of her. But, I don’t really like it when she talks about the past somehow, because it’s too painful for me.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Page 92 When did you start finding you were quite fond of her, quite recently or in...?
Quite recently, yes. Yes. Yes. It’s nice of her to buy me a grave.
Oh good. And does she look like you at all?
I don’t know really. She was quite different from me, I mean I was not a success, I was a worry to everybody, and impossible, and all this. But she was a nurse and then an air hostess, and all this kind of thing. Quite social.
And when did she go to Canada?
After being a nurse she went to Canada and became an air hostess there.
So when she was quite young?
Yes.
And does she have children?
Yes, she has four children I think.
Do you know them at all?
Oh a wee bit but I forget their names. I’m not great at family things, but, she’s separated from her husband now, he took to drink or something, but, it was all OK till she went to this wretched night class about relationships and things, and this obviously persuaded her that the relationship was not tolerable. But I’m sure if she had never have gone to this night class it would all have been all right.
And did she show any interest in your work?
Yes, to some extent, yes. I mean…I mean they’re all quite tickled at my having become a bit famous, when I was supposed to be a total failure you see, that it’s quite piquant really.
And were your parents alive when you began to have a sort of following, or not? How far had you got? Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Page 93
Yes, I was a wee bit, I mean I’d published short stories and had things on the radio and that kind of thing, so they were quite pleased, yes, yes. But, losing their money was very sad for them, they had a very sad life really, and they really were incompatible. But who can ever say why people are compatible or incompatible, because it’s quite clear that many people you think are totally incompatible get on fine, or it proves as they say viable, or whatever, who knows?
And, as a child and a young person, was there any other adult who was very important to you, was there anybody who you felt close to and talked to? Was there anyone you would have gone to for advice for example?
Advice, never, no. No, just my auntie really, yes.
Did you have any heroes?
Well, I remember before my mother went back to America when she stayed on her own in Hillsborough, she took me up to Glasgow to see a matinee play about St George, and I was very enamoured of St George, but then I heard that he was English, and this caused the most terrible upset inside me, I had to reconcile the fact that he had been so handsome and everything with his being English. And I remember really worrying and worrying about this, how it could possibly have come about. But who had told me he was English I can’t remember. But I remember being very very impressed with him, and then this doleful news being imparted to me. [laughs]
So were you actually taught to be anti-English, or not?
I don’t know, it’s just natural. You don’t have to be taught to be anti-English, no. But I mean I’m not against you because you’re English; I like to beat the English at football but of course I usually get beaten by them, but I feel very strongly about, I mean for instance tonight Celtic’s playing Liverpool and I suppose they’ll get roundly beaten by Liverpool, but were they to beat Liverpool I would feel really happy for days and days and days. You don’t believe that.....
End of Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 11: Tape 6: Side A Page 94 Track 11: Tape 6: Side A
And as a child, did you play sport?
Oh yes, I was very fond of rugger and football, and when I went to Glasgow we used to play every Saturday morning in this terrible kind of cinder pitch. When I think of it now it was not grass, cinders, and there was all space for you to play, you put down your jackets for goals, and we went every Saturday morning, and I was very very keen on it. And then in the afternoon I went to see Queens Park, which was the team I supported, and my chums supported Rangers, so we went one week to Queens Park and one week to Rangers. No, I’ve always been keen on football, and I supported Queens Park very fervently, I used to be able to recite the name of every player in the team, and so on and so on.
And when you were playing yourself, presumably you were being very competitive, you had to be?
But you never thought of it as being competitive, but I really liked, I really liked playing, yes.
And did you do other sport?
Well we went swimming in the baths after school, that kind of thing, but…yes, it was just for the fun, good fun.
And this trip to the theatre, would that have been a rare event, or was theatre a part of life?
Yes, my mother had this wee car and very occasionally she would drive up to take me to see a film, or...
What do you remember seeing?
They were so hopeless films that I can’t remember them at all, but I remember I was to be taken to see Hell’s Angels, which is a film about fighter pilots in the First World War, and it was too foggy to go, and this was an absolute disaster, I’ve never got over it, even now I’ve never got over it.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 11: Tape 6: Side A Page 95 Did you subsequently see the film at all?
Never, never. It’s one of those total losses that something inside one will weep over till you die.
And had you been told a lot about the First World War, had that sunk in?
Yes, it sank in quite a bit. I mean when we were at boarding school the toy planes we played with were all from the First World War, Sopwith Camels and things like this, yes. It was very...yes, all the... And then all the board games you played were to do with the First World War, and there were a lot of books with photos of the First World War. Yes it was quite... [telephone] Will I ignore it?
It’s up to you.
I can ignore it easily, easily.
And...
[phone ringing]
Ignore it.
What toys did you have of your own?
At boarding school, model aeroplanes, model boats, all just the usual, the usual kind of things. But I went on being fond of motorboats after most people had sort of abandoned it.
Meaning what?
Well I mean I like building model boats in a very inexpert way, and...
[phone ringing]
Shall I answer it?
No, don’t answer it. Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 11: Tape 6: Side A Page 96
Well the only thing, it’s possible I suppose it’s Eileen.
Oh sorry, sorry.
But, not very likely I suppose. It’s very unlikely. It’ll be something for you and you’ll be stuck for hours.
No I won’t, no.
[break in recording]
Just tell me where we’ve been just now.
A wee tour round my garden.
What did we see?
Oh a sort of miscellany. A wet day miscellany I suppose we saw.
[break in recording]
Before we start for real, I have to ask you, what’s the story of the emblem on your slippers?
I didn’t know there is an emblem on my slippers. What does it say? I’ve never looked at it. I’ve never examined it.
A sort of regal-looking lion with a tongue sticking out, a dragon tail and an axe.
I don’t know anything about it at all.
Where did the slippers come from?
Pia gave them to me, I don’t know where they came from.
I’m sure they’re symbolic.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 11: Tape 6: Side A Page 97 Germany probably. In that case they will be allegorical, but I’ve never examined them. I’ll examine them tonight after you’ve gone.
We were talking in the garden about Princess Diana, because I went into the little piece, the little shelter which has an inscription that made me think about Diana having no place to shelter, and that led you to tell me firstly about one place where you’ve already brought in the word ‘Diana’ which is a particularly peaceful spot here.
Yes.
And then also about the piece of work you’re doing for the Serpentine.
Yes.
I wondered if you could firstly tell me about the piece of work that’s already here, and then about the Serpentine piece.
The piece of work that is already here was this little wall, pointed wall structure, which is based on a cascade that Kent made I think at Rousham, it’s a kind of copy of that, but made just with stones from the old dry stone dykes up the hill, and it’s just a little pool and there’s a little arch that the water flows out of. And it’s very enclosed. And I made it really as an echo of the much larger Kent piece. But when my daughter came home and saw it she immediately said, ‘This is Diana’s pool,’ thinking of the pool I suppose where Diana was bathing when Actaeon came upon her. And as soon as she said that I saw that this was really so, and I went and read in Ovid, and the description is really surprisingly like the water, it does flow under a little arch, which I hadn’t realised at all. So, I had the formal, the one formal stone, the keystone, in the middle, and I hadn’t yet put anything on it, so I decided that I would make so to speak official recognition of what my daughter had said, so I looked up in the Olsen’s Nautical, Olsen’s Fisherman’s Nautical Almanac, and there was one fishing boat called the ‘Artemis’ and one called ‘Diana’. So I put one and its port letters and numbers on one side of the keystone, and on the other side I put the other. And only it just…I forgot about it and last week or some very recent time when it was so to speak Diana Week, and it was quite far on in the evening, and I had already put my pyjamas and dressing gown on, and I suddenly saw the word ‘Diana’, and I thought, do I have the word ‘Diana’ here? And so I put on my welly boots and went up, and there the last rays of the sun were on the keystone and there was the word ‘Diana’, and I was Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 11: Tape 6: Side A Page 98 quite kind of amazed that now the word was of course transformed by what had happened. And then the… Is it not right?
No it’s fine.
Yes? OK? Then the other… Of course, like everybody else I was very involved and fascinated in the Diana event, and one of the things that struck me about it was the way that it was something completely new, in Britain that I had never had such an experience in Britain, and it seemed to me that what had emerged in that week was like, these two words, The People, like with a capital T and capital P, which of course were familiar to me from the French Revolution, and from people writing on Rousseau and so on, but it seemed to me absolutely clear and objective that out of persons, crowds, the populous, whatever, had emerged this other thing called The People, which one had read about but had never actually seen, and perhaps had rather treated as being just literary, but like many of those kind of things, they turn out to be really quite real, actual, and there it was, you could see the people. And the other thing I thought was that this is also very like Rousseau’s ‘general will’ that was guiding everything or had taken over or something like this. Something I had never, never thought to see, and I thought that all my life, everything that’s happened to me, even if it was new to me, has been in some way familiar, but this was both totally unfamiliar and yet familiar from history or some other kind of level of things. Then, I’m doing this work for the Serpentine, which is not for an exhibition but permanent work and part of the renovation of the gallery, which is to be opened some time in October, and I had already decided of course what I’m doing, and my letter-cutter collaborators are working on it, but the director of the Serpentine phoned me up, and of course I knew that there was to have been a celebratory dinner when everything was completed, and Diana was to be the guest of honour, Princess Diana, and of course now the dinner was cancelled, and I suppose the staff in the Serpentine felt unusually involved in what had happened because they were about to have that contact with her. Anyway, the director said to me that they would like in some way the garden of my work would be dedicated to her, and what would I think about it. And they perhaps thought that because I’m well known to be very interested in the French Revolution and so on that I would not be approving of this, but I felt no, that’s fine. But I said, the question is, how it has to be done, that it has to be done in some subtle way that we have to think of. And I began to wonder, is there any classical inscription relating to the goddess Diana which might be appropriate, and I discussed it with a friend who is a Latin and Greek scholar, and she said she would think about it. But she was already familiar with the text I had devised for a part of the work at Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 11: Tape 6: Side A Page 99 the Serpentine, and she said that she felt that no other text could be more apposite than the one that I had already elected to be there from six months ago or something like that. And this text consists first of a list or an inscription of the main trees in the park, the woodland, and then followed by a sentence from the eighteenth century philosopher Hutcheson about trees and their beauty and how they appealed to people who were pensive, and people who love or seek solitude, and people who are amorous, and this sentence seemed really so apposite to Diana that I thought all we need to do is just to add a few factual words about her relationship with the gallery. Now, I don’t know if this is what will be done, because the director there is not only responsible for the gallery but responsible to the royal parks and to various other committees, so I don’t know exactly what will happen, but my present thought is that this would be the perfect way of doing it, first because there’s so much lettering, that the additional lettering will have a very discreet presence which is what is wanted, and secondly that it invokes the myth of the goddess which is really so appropriate in every way to the princess. So this is what I would like to do, but we’ll see what happens. But for me it’s another reminder that art is often much more apposite than one realises when one is making it, and that this is not just an idle fancy but has for me been proved to be so again and again. Also how Classicism, which people tend to think of as having no relevance to our time, so often proves to have a very great relevance. All sorts of things could be said about it, but that would be my thought on it for the moment.
Mm. And we were talking outside too about the fact that some people are suggesting there should be a figurative memorial to her, and you were talking about the way Classicism could be used to distance that.
Yes, but I think that...I think many people would have the feeling that there should be a figurative monument, and other people would have strongly the feeling that there should not be, but I think one of the problems is that it would be very difficult to find a figurative sculptor of sufficient quality or subtlety today to do it. Secondly that it would not at all be a question of just having a figurative sculpture, it would be a question of where it was placed, how it was placed, this would be really the crucial thing, that anything can be brought off if it is brought off, there’s nothing impossible to do; but certain things are very difficult to do, and undoubtedly our time has got almost no feeling for environmental art of any kind, which is strange since it talks about it all the time, but I think that of all the ages I can think of, our age has the least sense of that, and for example you only need to think of that Henry Moore sculpture being placed in front of the Houses of Parliament, which is such a mis-match as to be Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 11: Tape 6: Side A Page 100 almost beyond belief that it could be allowed to be done, because there’s always politicians being interviewed precisely with that in the background so you see it every third day on the telly, and you think, my goodness, how could any age allow this discord to take place. So it is a...it’s not a question of what Classicism could do, it’s a question of who could do the Classicism I think. And of course there’s many other possible solutions beyond a figurative sculpture, but we’ll see what happens.
And you were saying that you like the Peter Pan sculpture.
Yes, it would be hard to say whether I like it as sculpture, or whether I like it as something that’s so wrapped around with all sorts of things, like for instance a love of Peter Pan for a start. I mean I think Peter Pan is a really great play, I mean, I find it astonishing, but of course it’s far too tough a play for our time to grasp. I mean, it’s amazing to me that Barrie wrote it before the First World War, before this tragic experience, because it’s such an absolutely tragic play, and so objective in its vision of cruelty and so on, I think it’s a most remarkable play; how it could ever be considered to be sentimental is quite, quite beyond me.
Did you see it as a child, or you’ve read it subsequently?
No, I saw it and I read it, but I’ve read it several times recently too, because it’s just absolutely fascinating.
Why did you read it again, what made you pick it up?
Because I thought that I had probably missed a lot of things about this, and I actually made a card about the bit where Peter is on the rock and thinks he’s going to drown, and his heart begins to beat very fast, and... So it’s just an amazing piece of writing. And I put it beside a book which I read in a history of the war in Europe, Second World War, by Chester Wilmot I think it was. Anyway, it’s from a letter written by a young German SS soldier before the Battle of the Bulge in which he was killed to his sister I think, and it is really exactly this Peter Pan speech, but just exactly, and it’s quite astonishing that Barrie could have managed this. So, yes, I mean, I think that sometimes we are frightened to see certain works fully, or we shelter ourselves from them or something like that.
Do you remember the impact it had on you as a child, did any of that come through?
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 11: Tape 6: Side A Page 101 Oh as a child I just saw it as a nice exciting thing, I mean, which it also is, this is the point that it exists on different levels, like so much good art, but I think Barrie is simply too much for our time, we don’t understand art or something in the way that he did.
And would you have gone to the statue just once or twice, or was it somewhere you went?
No, I just used to see it when I was in the Army and spent weekend leaves in London, and, yes, I used to see it, but I remember it as being very nice. But there’s lots of nice Neoclassical sculpture. And I’ve probably said it to you before, because I’m often saying it, but I have a work in the Köller Müller sculpture park in Holland and so, I have a book which is a lot of photos taken in the park, and so many of the things, I think it’s one of the best sculpture parks but so many of the things just seem really not to work very well. And then when you turn the page you come on this reclining nude by Maillol, which is just a Neoclassical figurative sculpture, bronze, and it really is so, works so perfectly, and compared to other things it fits in so beautifully with the grass and the trees and everything, and I often ask myself, why does it fit in so well, what is it about semi-realistic sculpture that would make it fit into nature so much better than Barbara Hepworth, or whoever is in that garden? I can’t answer it, I can only say that the evidence is there, look at it, it just works perfectly, and it does seem to be a fact that figurative sculpture does work wonderfully with trees and things; why, I don’t know, but it just seems to do it, and you just need to look at garden books and you see photos of Neoclassical sculpture in French gardens, or any gardens, and it looks so right.
Don’t you think it tends to be gentler?
No, no not at all. No. No, I mean nothing could be more soppy really than much modern abstract sculpture that is put into nature, which, I’m sure I’ve said this too, which seems to me inadequate because it ignores the tragic aspect of nature altogether, but, I think you have to say, for me it’s a mystery, it’s almost like something pre-ordained, that this is the kind of sculpture that will fit with nature. Of course there’s no figurative sculpture in my garden, but partly because I don’t know any figurative sculpture that I could collaborate with who would I think really please me or something like that. I think if I could find somebody who did I would try it, but I would feel it was a very daring thing to do, but I’m not averse to trying to be daring.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 11: Tape 6: Side A Page 102 And Eros was another sculpture you said you...
Yes, I mean, I saw a photo or a film of it or something recently and I thought really, how refined it is compared to modern art, I mean how really refined it is, how beautiful. You have a funny wee smile on your face.
Again, was that somewhere you would have gone to quite a lot, or you just remember...?
Yes, of course, yes, mhm. Mhm.
And going back to Diana, had she made a big impression on you before she died, had you been someone who was interested in her?
Not particularly at all, but I did watch the interview, the famous Panorama interview, and I certainly was incredibly impressed with the way she comported herself, is that the word, in that interview, that it was a quite astonishing piece of, whatever you would call it, tour de force, really quite extraordinary. That certainly impressed me. But I had not thought a great deal about her, but in that I’m like so many other people who were drawn into what happened. I mean, part of the thing was that so many people said that they had really thought very little about her and they couldn’t understand why they were so moved, so involved in it. And there are so many elements in it, like her getting buried on that island which immediately recalls Rousseau being buried on the island, and so much so that one wonders if one day her body would be removed to some pantheon that we don’t yet know about or something. And I cut out and put in my scrap album a photo of her brother in the boat laden with flowers, rowing across to this island. All these things are quite amazing, and...yes, with that kind of reality which in a way you associate with art or something, or... The parallel for me is when Albert Speer sent me the, was it eleven or twelve photos of the garden he made in Spandau, and he wrote a little...which he had taken secretly when the guards weren’t looking, to let me see what the garden had been like, and he wrote little comments on the back. Maybe I spoke of this before. I did.
Not this particular bit.
Well just that, there was something about, which I first noticed when I read his book Spandau Diaries which he had written secretly in prison and had smuggled out bit by bit and then was put together after he was released, and I thought that his writing had Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 11: Tape 6: Side A Page 103 a really extraordinary quality which was not being allowed to be seen because of the particular circumstance, and people’s attitude to him et cetera. But I really thought that his writing had an extraordinary kind of, I can’t explain it, super-real or mythical or compelling quality. Anyway when he wrote these little things on the back of the photographs for me, they had this same kind of thing, like on the one he had made this very simple little trellis out of wee bits of wood for, I think it was a rose to climb up, and he wrote on the back something like, ‘My flower,’ or something, ‘was supposed to climb the trellis’. But it was really like, my life should have been other than it turned out, or had these hopes, or whatever. And about, I think it was Funk who died before his sentence, was taken out into hospital and died, and Speer made this memorial for him by putting bricks round a tree, which fascinated me of course because I had made the tree column basis. But he wrote on the back, ‘Memorial for Funk, who died outside,’ and of course they all died outside, or banished, like in exile, like Ovid being in exile or whatever. But just these little hand-written words had this extraordinary kind of resonance which you knew he hadn’t calculated, but which, something in him, like an artist would do, like a resonance, which you couldn’t explain, but which you would expect to find in art or something like that, but not any kind of artifice because they were just simply written. And I think almost all his comments, which I can’t remember just at this minute, were like that, and that is this extraordinary thing where events cease to be on a mundane level and take on this other kind of reality, and maybe you would call it archetypal or, something like that anyway, and of course people are.....
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You have to say more now.
[break in recording]
Yes, what I was saying?
You were...the bit that didn’t come out was saying that it’s gratifying, that was the...
Yes, when things come on this sort of level people are gratified, because something in them desires it, and I suppose that they should get it from art also, but don’t usually.
And, we were talking also a little bit in the garden about the way all the photographs and film of Diana, all the images, are now changed.
Yes, but you were saying this, I think you have to explain it, not me.
But you agreed.
I agree totally but I can’t...I can’t exactly say. They changed by what happened, not by what happened in a simple factual way, but by this great feeling or whatever that happened.
Did you feel part of the feeling, or did you feel an observer of the feeling?
No, I didn’t feel an observer of the feeling at all; I felt absolutely part of it. I think I felt less surprised than a lot of people about... I mean, a lot of people I know expressed almost like astonishment at their being so involved, but it didn’t really surprise me because I have felt involved in some things before, like in the French Revolution for example, even though I wasn’t there. But another thing that I never mentioned that struck me was that, one or two people for instance who write for ‘The Scotsman’ and they write regularly, in a kind of quite intellectual, smarty-pants kind of way, but always following fashion, but they also see themselves as being so observant and so talented and so...and so independent. And I thought to myself, now what are they going to do? Because they could not write about this thing that was happening with their usual kind of cynical distance, with their usual psychological interpretation of everything, with their usual superiority, but I knew they would have Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 12: Tape 6: Side B Page 105 to write pieces, and one of them had to write a piece on the funeral, and it was very cleverly written but I could see that it was profoundly uneasy, and I thought, in the end, you’re not brave, that you really wanted to pour scorn on this, but you were frightened to do it because of the depth of the feeling around you. And I thought, now you know maybe a wee bit what it feels like to be writing against the fashion, or wanting to write against a fashion, but they were tested and they failed, that they had to abandon their positions. But now of course they want to go back to writing their smarty-pant pieces. But to me it was absolutely fascinating to see them being caught in this, something that they couldn’t deal with in their usual terms. But they could have dealt with it in their usual terms if they had been brave, because they ought to be able to apply their usual terms to everything, but they were shown up.
And did you watch the funeral?
Yes, most of it.
And did you feel that was well done?
I don’t think you can say well done, it’s not somehow the right words, but I thought it was really astonishing when you think of the number of things that can go wrong with such an elaborate event, that nothing appeared to go wrong was almost extraordinary, as if it was being borne along on the wave of itself or something. And I mean if you think that the soldiers had to lift the coffin, they had to put it down, it had to be put in the hearse thing, it had to be put in that stand in the cathedral; that the flowers had to stay on it; the flag had not to get blown off. All the things that could have gone wrong, and yet it all... And it would have been dreadful if anything had gone wrong, in some ultimate kind of way it would have been dreadful, like something being wrong in a work of art or something. But it all went off just like this, and you couldn’t but be utterly amazed at it. But, the analogy is in a sense absurd but it sort of reminded me of the day that the Sheriff Officer attacked Little Sparta, and also everything went absolutely right, and everybody behaved in the way exactly that they should have behaved, as if they were all following a script, it was just like that, and even the Sheriff Officer seemed to know what he was to do, and did it. And this also was amazing to me, when you thought of all the things that could have gone wrong.
We did talk about that day on the tape, but when I was last here which was in November of ’93, the case was still going on and you were waiting for the next blow, Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 12: Tape 6: Side B Page 106 and the signs that are on your gates are very dismal, so I wondered what’s happened really in those three years.
Well they had their case in the court, and, well first I had a meeting with the then visual arts director of the Scottish Arts Council, Andrew Nairne, and I told him there’s going to be the case and it’s very serious, and you know very well that the SAC has a remit to advise Government at every level including the Region and everything pertaining to the arts, and now finally you have to take it seriously and speak to them. And this filthy child told me that if they did speak to the Region, the Region might be annoyed, and the Region gives money to the arts, and therefore the Region would take away all the money it gives to the arts. So, and then these words came, ‘Your garden of Little Sparta should be sacrificed to the greater good of the arts in Scotland.’ This is his exact words, I’ll never forget it. So, they said nothing, and then the case came, and I had this supposedly very posh lawyer. Usually I have a little lawyer in Glasgow who usually deals with petty criminals and things, but is very sweet to me, but this posh lawyer had taught her in some way. And anyway, for reasons that I don’t understand he said that he would represent me free, and so he did this. And the case that the Region brought was, not to do with the issue, is the building religious or not religious, but that my case should not be allowed to be heard, because in 1985 I had not made a formal application for an appeal hearing. And it turned out that my lawyer had never read even the ten or something selected letters that I had given him, he knew nothing about the case at all, and without having informed me what he was going to do, he argued on some ridiculous precedent of some firm that had not applied for something because they thought they wouldn’t get it. I mean it just was ridiculous. So of course he lost the case, and the Sheriff was not told the facts at all, and he said that the Sheriff ruled that I had to pay the debt, whatever it was, and that if I didn’t pay it, that such, ten per cent or something was to be added every year until I did, and so on. Which in effect that meant that the case, the actual case could never be heard, the actual issues could never be heard at all. And I was really outraged, because what my lawyer should have said, it was quite simple, that in 1985 I didn’t make an application for an appeal hearing since year after year after year I made application to be allowed a hearing which is laid down by Parliament that I am entitled to, but had never been allowed it. What the outcome would have been is another matter, but I was never allowed it. And my intention was that I would get people like Stephen Bann and so on to speak. So that was one reason. Then also in 1985 the Region had been holding stuff taken from, art works taken from the garden temple already for two years, which was illegal. First they should not have taken them because I had never been allowed the hearing, but secondly they’re not Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 12: Tape 6: Side B Page 107 allowed to take things punitively. Anything they take they have to auction against the alleged debt, but they didn’t, and they had then held the things for two years, and they eventually held them for five years, and then just dumped them back at my gate. And the third thing was that in that same year the Region had tried to take money directly out of my bank account, and in the space of three days had faxed the bank for the grotesque sum of £32,000, which was like, more than ten times the alleged debt. So by 1985 I had concluded that the law had no standing whatever in Strathclyde Region, and that for me to go on asking for a hearing that I was never going to be allowed was ridiculous. So I’ve just given up. And it to be found that in 1985 I had not applied for a hearing and that therefore I had no rights at all, which is just so utterly grotesque an outcome that I just, I think to me quite beyond words. But of course the basic thing is this, that the Arts Council had not said a word. And since then when people have written and complained about the situation, they have sent only deceitful letters which make people, they’re so couched as to make people understand that the SAC has been supporting me financially; it’s never given me a penny. And also that it has done all it could, which is just lies, they’re just lying to people. So I feel really very angry, well more than angry, something other, despairing about it. It’s all just grotesque. So, I decided that if the garden has no place in public life, which is what was being said, then the garden can be closed, and that’s it. But you’ll see that one day there might be a miracle.
So, sorry, the issue only concerns the Region if it’s open to the public, or it’s...or not, how deeply connected are they?
No, my...no, what...no, my argument was, first that the building is religious, and secondly that it is a public building, not a private building. But I feel that since I’ve never been allowed to argue my case in the way that it was laid down by Parliament that I had the right to do, and since the ruling evidently is that the building has no public status, right, then, OK, the building has no public status and the garden is closed, that’s it. That, I want this understood that there is no public place for what this was in the culture, no public place; that has to be seen, and that is important, that says something about the nature of the culture, and of course a great deal about the Scottish Arts Council, and so on.
So really, it confirms all that you were saying about the secularisation.
Yes, exactly confirms what I was saying. And that’s quite important, but only it remains as it were a secret because the outcome of the case was never reported. Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 12: Tape 6: Side B Page 108
You kept saying ‘85; you meant ’95?
No, ’85. I don’t know why they chose ’85.
Oh right.
I’ve no idea why they chose ’85, it seems to me quite arbitrary, but there might be some reason that I don’t know.
Right. So when did you actually close the garden?
There, after the case, which, whenever that was, was it two years ago? I can’t remember to be truthful.
So it’s been closed for a long time now?
Yes, I closed it.
So what have those summers been like without people?
Well, of course it’s, I feel bitter or something, because it was never intended to be a private garden, I mean, in the same way that Classicism is not a private art. You know, it’s the same when I was doing the work at the Serpentine, that I explained to Julia, the director, that I wasn’t going to do anything dramatic or full of self- expression or whatever; that it was a public work and what was needed that it would be modest, harmonious, and beautiful, and for me that’s what a public art, public work should be. And I feel that, I don’t want the garden open under some kind of false pretences, that it was to be a public place with a public role in the public culture, and if the public culture says that your stance is so absurd that it cannot even be considered, then that is defining something about the culture. But it just amazes me that the number of people who have said such nice things about my garden, to me far nicer things than I think it deserves, but that the SAC has got away completely with what it did, that nobody has questioned it.
And it’s managed to do it as you say by totally evading the issues.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 12: Tape 6: Side B Page 109 By totally evading the issue, because the issue would be very uncomfortable for it, and for our culture in general.
But nevertheless it’s significant that you are keeping on with the garden, you haven’t been defeated in that sense?
No, no no, I keep on with the garden, but I’ve added to it also, but it has to be said that realistically the existence of the garden is very precarious because no gardener, no garden, and as soon as I can’t pay the gardener, that’s the end of the garden, I mean it’s as simple as that. I couldn’t possibly keep the garden the size that it has become, it’s impossible. In the old days I could mow the whole thing in one afternoon, but now it’s a three-day task and so on. So I’ve had to find the gardener’s wages myself, and that’s £21,000 a year, more now, and it’s very very difficult for me to have to find that before I feed myself or even extend the garden or do anything. But I will go on as long as I can, but how long, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know how long I can find such sums of money, you know.
And in practice, have people been coming privately to see the garden?
I‘ve let one or two people come, but in general I’ve said no. There’s one or two people who were friends or whatever that it seemed...or else people who, one or two people who were, their friends told me they were dying or this and that, they wanted to see the garden, so I said well yes, OK. But in general I’ve kept to it. Of course it’s sometimes quite difficult to say no, and it’s certainly impossible for me to explain exactly why the garden’s closed, but I have kept to it, and I would keep to it, but I always have this hope that there would be some intervention.
In a funny way it’s almost like Speer’s garden in that it becomes an unseen garden, an inaccessible garden.
Yes, of course. And in a way if the garden did cease to exist, which I see as quite possible, because it is difficult to find such huge sums of money, but it would remain as a myth or something, in the same way that Shenstone’s eighteenth century garden disappeared very soon after, but it remains in the history, or as a kind of myth or something like that. I don’t think it would be so easily forgotten.
But I don’t think it would be allowed to disappear either, do you really think it would?
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 12: Tape 6: Side B Page 110 Well, it always amazes me that people can be so eager to come, as they often are, and when you tell them it’s closed their interest stops immediately. They never seem to think, why is it closed, how could it be opened? But that is the thing that the world is most lacking in, is practical imagination. I mean, you see this all the time in things, that people who could be helped by some simple gesture don’t get it, because people just, either they see and don’t think or something, I don’t know what it is, but any kind of practicality and imagination, the two things never seem to me to...
Oh it’s a cat.
Has it opened the door?
[break in recording]
And does Victoria Miro have any ideas?
Well, it’s clear that the Trust has really achieved nothing, the Little Sparta Trust has achieved nothing, and would have to be totally reorganised. None of the trustees have ever come to see the garden.
Has Nicholas Serota not been here?
Oh yes he came once, but I can’t think of anybody else. Well Roy Strong came but he had to be here anyway. But in general, after the court case nobody asked what had happened, nobody expressed any concern, nobody comforted me. There was just complete nothing, nothing. And Duncan Macmillan, you know, who writes art criticism in The Scotsman, when he did his review of the year, and he’s a trustee, he never mentioned what had happened to the garden at all. So, though my friend Jessie has retired now, and she says she would like to try and revive the Trust, and she’s going to meet Victoria later this month or something. I think we’d need to find fewer people and just two or three people who really would try and do something about it. Yes.
Is Jessie the same Jessie who started Wild Hawthorn Press with you?
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
And how did she come into your life? Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 12: Tape 6: Side B Page 111
[laughs] That’s another story altogether. Anyway, anyway, she’s now a very old friend, and very loyal friend, yes. But, I have to write her a letter about the exact situation with the Trust and the case and everything. I’m sorry I’ve never done it, because I’ve lost faith in some way in things, that the case was such a shock to me, and that they could all get away with it seemed to me so extraordinary. It’s not as if my garden was unknown, and it’s not as if many people weren’t very fond of it, but all that counted for nothing, you know.
It’s also, it’s a completely negative outcome, I mean nobody has got anything from it.
No, completely negative, yes. But I see that the people on the Trust are just useless, and I mean, Victoria told me for instance that Stephen Bann never attended a single meeting of the trustees, not one, so...
Well that’s very strange isn’t it? Because he’s...
I find it extraordinary, just extraordinary. But none of them, except Ian Appleton did a little bit certainly, yes, I have to say that he did something, but apart from him, nobody did anything.
And the legal people don’t think there’s any way of getting another hearing?
Well after my experience with that lawyer, I have no legal people. I mean, I’ve never been able to find a moderately efficient lawyer, never mind a brilliant lawyer.
And for you, I mean you’ve always had a fairly isolated life, particularly through the winter, but it must make a big difference to you that there isn’t that contact in the summer.
I can’t say that my life is that isolated really. I mean sometimes the winter, I don’t see that many people, but I’m always doing things. I can’t really say that I feel that isolated.
But presumably the presence of people coming to the garden in the summer made a difference to the pattern of your life.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 12: Tape 6: Side B Page 112 Yes, yes it did, but, I mean I have friends who come, not to see the garden, you know. I can’t say that my life’s that solitary, but I sometimes feel that for all the number of exhibitions I have and things, it’s still, I feel very solitary in relation to my work. I mean, the wee book I just gave you, I mean that’s quite a nice wee book, but what happens to it? It doesn’t exist in the world at all. And what would one do about that? And I know other people, I mean, Colin’s books...
Colin Sackett.
Yes. I mean, what does he do? He does them and he sends one to me, and one to Harry Gilonis I suppose and so on. But in no sense do his books have any public life.
Well, actually I don’t quite agree with you about either of them, either yours or his, but I can see that the public life doesn’t come back to you, you don’t know about it.
Well if I don’t know about it, then for me the activity is solitary in the way that it shouldn’t be. But not only mine, I mean I feel it about Colin, I feel it about, I feel it about a number of other people whose work seems to me should be part of the public life of the culture, and isn’t.
And do you feel at the moment there’s no hope that it will become so, you really think...?
I don’t know what could be done about it. I said to Colin the other day that it seems wrong and such a shame, but what can one do? And the way Colin spoke, he had sort of given up any thought of anything that one could do about it. Does it surprise you?
Which part?
Well, that he would not have wanted to think as it were what could be done, because he felt...
I think part of it is that a lot of the time now when somebody is getting a lot of notice taken of them, you feel that the quality of the notice is not something one would particularly want, that the kind of response you are really wanting is something quite different from the kind of publicity coverage and people flocking and all that kind of thing. You’re wanting actually a much more private response.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 12: Tape 6: Side B Page 113 Well it’s only just that the thing should be part of... I remember when that Waldemar boy, what’s his name, Januszczak, when he wrote in the paper that my work had no part in the world of art, and I was absolutely outraged at that. I mean he could have said he didn’t like my work or something and I would have thought, och... But to say it had no part in the world of art, I felt that was unjust, that it clearly had a part in the world of art. But in another way he was right, that for his world of art my work had no part. Well, this is not what I mean, but when I had that very.....
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You know, this is not what I mean, it’s on a different level, but when I had that very big exhibition in the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, I mean, it might as well not have happened in Britain, I mean it never got mentioned in Britain at all, and...no, it just might as well not have existed, nobody mentioned it, nobody reviewed it, nobody spoke about it. And that was quite disappointing for me. Not that I wanted a lot of praise, but I would have liked that it had a kind of public existence. I mean I don’t want to be collected by Saatchi or something, heaven forbid, but you want that your art is not just...yes, in some veil of solitude. But not only mine, I mean, Harry Gelonis, I would like his poems to be part of some public world, and Patrick Eyres, his New Arcadian Journal, I mean, he’s a remarkable person, I mean he is so good an influence in the world, but he has no public role in it, and this seems to me utterly grotesque. What is wrong with everybody that they can’t see what he’s doing, the merits of it, and the sheer good that he’s doing in gathering things together and presenting them, and so on? And, yes, I could go on listing people, it seems to me that they live in a sense, their work lives this life of solitude, and has no public place. How can this happen?
And have you an answer?
No I don’t know the answer, it’s a mystery to me, because...that the merits of some people seem to me so obvious, and then wee Stephen Duncalf sitting alone in Nottingham making his paintings, completely sad because he’s totally neglected. But I think he’s so much in the English tradition that he should be having one-man shows in the Tate, but nobody says a word about him. I can’t bear to think of him sitting there all sad and going on in faith, producing work that has no public life at all. Do you see what I mean?
Mm.
It’s awful. But I don’t know what can be done about it.
I mean, one of the things I wanted to ask you, I mean, we’ve talked a lot about feeling that the culture has become very secular.
Yes.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 13: Tape 7: Side A Page 115 I wondered if you knew how it might be, if it weren’t so how it might become. Supposing for a moment one was optimistic and thought that there might gradually be changes so that that wouldn’t be the case any more, what would you, how would you see it actually showing itself?
Well I mean I would have to say that the Diana thing showed that something completely unexpected can happen, and I don’t mean the death, I mean the aftermath, can happen in a society. I mean something completely unexpected. Therefore who knows what could happen?
But you don’t actually have any things that could be seen to be measures of it, if it were improving for example, there’s nothing that you could see that could be perhaps directed at all, it’s got to come...
Yes. Well I mean I haven’t ceased to want the revolution of course, but I can see we’re not at the moment going to get that. I don’t...I don’t really know the answers to these questions. But the problem with me is that I feel older and tired now in a way that I didn’t before. I feel tired, and I used to live not with hope of anything specific but in a condition of hope, and now I don’t, I live in a condition of some kind of despair, which is totally new to me, totally new to me; I never thought that I could feel it.
And is that really what’s happened since the case?
Yes. But then it’s maybe to do with getting older, because a lot of old people get sad don’t they, I think. You don’t know yet.
And do you have times when you’re not sad?
Yes, occasionally. Occasionally, but now underneath it always I feel the shadow somehow. I mean I’m quite capable of being pleased by nice events and things, I mean if Celtic was to beat Liverpool tonight I would be delighted, but underneath it now there’s this kind of shadow, and I feel that even in bad times, I always had...my basic condition was one of hope, and now I see that it isn’t, and I’m perplexed about it, really perplexed about it. But partly you do get tired, I mean, you make big efforts and they’re tiring.
But apart from weariness, you are physically strong, are you? Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 13: Tape 7: Side A Page 116
No, I feel physically tired now really.
All the time?
Most of the time, yes. Yes. Yes, the days when I could write eight letters a night are over. One a day would be it. But that, people do get older, only you don’t think that it’s going to happen to you, and it’s difficult to take it seriously. Anyway...
Are you still writing?
Yes, I don’t write as a separate activity from working, but yes of course I still work and I’ve got a lot of projects, yes.
When did the wave piece that we were looking at last, when did that...?
The spring. Well I mean I started the idea in the previous autumn, and I had the idea before that, but, to some extent that’s partly finished now and, yes, that was done this spring, and then I hope to start the bit beyond it this autumn, if I can find the money.
And what will that be?
Well, I don’t exactly at the moment; I wanted to make a part of the garden which was like English parkland, as a contrast to the rest of the garden, so that’s what that bit is. Then, you wouldn’t see because we didn’t go down that far but there’s another pond down there, and there’s a lane being planted, and in the lane, of course it will take some years for it to grow to the height I imagine, but it’s a narrow lane, and I’m going to put I think five benches with inscriptions about lanes, that’s the next thing I want to do. Then beyond that, there’s all this wild stuff, I don’t know what it is, which is very pretty in the summer, it has this creamy flower, but it’s all wild, so at the moment half that area is park land and half is wild, so you can’t really have it like an absolute black and white division. So what I want to do is to work into the wild bit, maintain a part of the wild bit, but work into it. And the wee stream bit that comes out of the loch and into that second pond there, it comes out near the fence, so I’m going to get a machine, a digging machine and make it come out the other side, and meander down, and that will open up a big bit of ground. Then I have another work that I want somehow to do there which means making first a grassy bit before I make the work. Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 13: Tape 7: Side A Page 117 This is my plan, but it’s not absolutely clear to me but something like this that I want to do.
And what would the work be?
I don’t want to talk about it yet because it’s too...you know, you can spoil works if you talk about them before they’re partly realised, you know. But I have quite a clear picture of it. But, it’s not easy to do things in the garden. It’s just not so easy that you’re moving real earth and shifting real plant, planting real trees, and somehow it’s OK in the sitting-room when you’re thinking about it; when you’re actually doing it, it’s quite difficult sometimes. But anyway we’ll see how it gets on.
[break in recording]
[inaudible].
No, I’ll say it tomorrow, because I’m tired now, but I’ll say it to you now. You put it off.
Really?
Yes.
Well can I remind myself, we want to talk about the Germans who supported you in your case when the English didn’t, or the British didn’t.
Yes.
[break in recording]
I’ll try not to be surprised. Today’s date is probably the 17th, do you think?
Yes.
And, did you have any conclusions about your slippers?
I never even looked at them, because I got too absorbed in the football.
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 13: Tape 7: Side A Page 118 Oh, it was a draw wasn’t it?
It was a draw
So are you moderately satisfied?
Yes, moderately satisfied.
[break in recording]
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One of the things I wanted to talk about, which I hope is a happier subject, because as you know I’ve come to know Alec a little bit over the years, I wondered, what I understand is that when he was very small, the garden was small and that they grew up together.
Yes.
Is that part of the garden for you, the presence of the children and the children growing?
Well, the garden as such didn’t really exist for the children. I mean to them it was a place to play in, to go in the boat, to do this, to do that. I don’t think they ever, they ever thought of it as a garden. And certainly Eck is very good at lecturing on the garden, but I can’t say that he ever did anything in it, ever. But, he has a kind of academic relationship with it, I think he, from what I hear he’s quite good in talking about it, but I can’t say he ever put a spade in the ground at any point.
Did you feel disappointed by that, or not?
No, not at all, not at all, no.
Why is he called Eck?
It’s a diminutive of Alec, which is a diminutive of Alexander, but it’s a name which, in sort of couthy Scottish stories, the farm worker or whatever would always be called Eck, so I always thought it would be really nice to have a child that’s called Eck.
Had you always wanted children?
No, I can’t say I ever really thought about it, no.
And did becoming a father change you do you think?
No, no. Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 14: Tape 7: Side B Page 120
What were you like as a father?
I think you’ll have to ask Eck. I mean, I don’t know. Evidently, if you judge by the results, not too terrible.
What’s your daughter called?
Aline.
And is she involved in the publishing world at all, or...?
No, she does things like puppets and story-telling, and things like this, in her wee way.
Is she like Alec?
I think she’s a bit amazed by him.
And you made them toys, didn’t you?
Yes.
And that always seems part of your whole work as well, I mean the element of toys is quite important isn’t it?
Well it’s the element of making that I like. Writing is not really very congenial to me, but holding a fret-saw, things like this, smelling balsa cement, this I find congenial, and I never would give it up entirely.
What are you making at the moment?
What I’m making at the moment is usually wee fishing boats to sail in my loch, and...
Do you make the boats that are on the windowsills, in the back of the house?
One of them I made, but what I usually make are very much smaller, about eight inches long and quite rough, like they look...they look...like modelling has become Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 14: Tape 7: Side B Page 121 very very sophisticated now and it’s really like light engineering or something, and models are incredibly realistic, and radio-controlled, and this and this and this. But I like models which look like models, and are kind of chunky and everything, so this is what I do.
And when do you sail them?
Oh, in the afternoons, not all the time but sometimes. And I want to make a wee film of them sailing, I will do this, I’ve got the camera and everything now, but this summer I was too busy to do it, but maybe next summer I’ll do it.
And presumably this summer you were doing work for the current exhibition?
Yes, yes I was getting ready for the Serpentine thing, and then I had an exhibition in Vienna, and an exhibition in Basle, and other things, I can’t remember it all, but I was very busy all the time.
There’s one about to open isn’t there, or has it opened?
It has just opened, in Dortmund.
And what is in that show?
That’s all my prints, every print I’ve ever done, so yes, there was quite a lot of preparation for that as well, yes.
And have you any desire to go to see that?
No.
Because it would be quite a...
No, I have no, no desire at all to go and see it.
Is one of the reasons for staying on the land sort of defensive, to sort of protect yourself, or what is it?
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 14: Tape 7: Side B Page 122 No, partly not travelling began, I don’t want to talk about it very much, I got attacked with a knife by somebody, and...
Randomly, or not?
Not too randomly. And after that I started getting panics when travelling, and I spent about three years sort of confronting this thing, like going to an analyst and this kind of thing, but it never really helped me, and after a time I got fed up and I thought, I don’t want to spend my life just trying to deal with this problem; the better thing is to accept the problem and go on with my life, and just treat it as a technical problem. And by and large I’ve managed this, that I don’t wear myself out thinking, oh I wish that I was at the opening of my exhibition, or I wish this or I wish that, I wish I could go on holiday to Spain, whatever. It’s better just to accept it and not let yourself be defined by it. So of course it’s not, if you could travel it would be easier to do the works all over the world, but if you can’t travel you have to find another way to do it. And I think if I could travel my work would not be one whit different from what it’s been, really. Though I suppose I might not have been so interested in making my own garden, but even that I doubt, because the ground was here, I made the garden.
And what is the relationship between the prints and the rest of the work? It’s all a unity isn’t it?
Yes, very often a thing might begin as a card and then become a print and then become an installation. Everything goes along kind of together, and I would hate to have to give up anything really. I like to go from one thing to another thing, and to see how an idea, whatever, can unfold in different ways. Yes.
And when the Wild Hawthorn Press began, did you begin actually making the books wherever you were, or, how did that start?
Yes, I had a very ancient kind of printing press about the size of a steam road roller that I used to try the print on, but printing was quite difficult, and as I did more things and other things, there began to be something all the time to do it, so I started working with printers, and I’d try always then just to have one main printer. And there’s also a wee printer with an Adana or something that I work with in the north of England, who was made redundant and took up printing in a shed at the end of his garden. So I always try to do wee work with him at one time so that he’s never without the wee Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 14: Tape 7: Side B Page 123 work. And also then I work with another printer now in Edinburgh who’s a big posh expensive printer, but very very nice to work with, very friendly and helpful people.
And do you see the books really as being, as we said, sort of part of this whole work, both in the garden and the other pieces, in all their forms? Do you see them in relationship to other people printing, such as Simon or Colin or...?
Yes.
Another person.....
[break in recording]
We were just talking about the relationship of the Wild Hawthorn Press books to other publishing ventures, and...
Yes. Do I see it as being akin to theirs? Yes, I’m very interested in what, in what Colin Sackett does; I’m very interested in what Simon Cutts does. Unfortunately not too many people whose work I can feel interested in; I find most artists’ books, this idiom, quite vacuous in some way, not very intelligent usually, not very talented usually. So it’s a disappointment. But Colin and Simon certainly I like very much to see what they’re doing.
And what are you actually reading at the moment?
I’m reading a book called something like Neoplatonism in English Literature, some title like that, about the influence of Neoplatonism on Milton, Wordsworth, the Cambridge Platonists, so on and so on. It’s a nice book to read in bed in the middle of the night, whatever, if you wake, because it’s kind of very wholesome.
Do you have nightmares?
No, I sometimes have, for a time, like for periods, maybe for two weeks or something, worrying dreams, often quite sort of long and realistic, but in general, no, I wouldn’t really say that I have nightmares in the sense of de Quincy or something like that, no.
And the long realistic dreams, are they here, are they based here, or are they...?
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 14: Tape 7: Side B Page 124 Sometimes they’re about being back in the Army, sometimes. Sometimes about aerial battles. Sometimes about having no home. Things like this.
At one point your home was under threat, because you thought you might have to sell it.
Yes, but that’s over now, yes.
Do you ever dream work?
Yes, occasionally, but it’s always hopeless, always hopeless. I occasionally wake up and think, aha! and then, when I write it down I think, och, deary me. Yes. No such luck, let’s say.
Right. And going back to the press, you set that up with somebody didn’t you.
With my friend Jessie who I lived with at that time.
And how did it come into being, how did it happen?
Well partly because it was so difficult to get things printed the way one wanted them to be printed. And then I thought to myself, why go through all this fuss when I could do it myself? So I just did that. But of course, in those days I had really no money at all, so it was very difficult.
And did you know anything about printing in those days? What were you trying to achieve?
Well I’d never heard, I don’t think artists’ books existed at that time, but if they had existed I would say that I wanted to make artists’ books like the book which would be a kind of self-legitimising object from start to finish, like the verbal content paper, actual size of the book, the weight, everything, to make a coherent entity, was what I wanted to do, still want to do. And I like doing cards because they also represent a particular kind of possibility that the card is not just a small print usually, and each thing has got its own validity, and that’s what I like, to see what you can do in this particular medium, just the same as in the garden, you can do particular things, and to go from one thing to another is, always recognising the medium has its own being or Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 14: Tape 7: Side B Page 125 whatever, that’s what’s pleasing, to try to...just accept the demands of the thing that you’re doing.
And how do you see the relationship if any between the little books and the pebble pieces? I mean are they comparable at all?
The pebble pieces?
Where you’ve got a letter on a small stone.
The pebble...no a pebble’s just another possibility. I mean I was interested in the pebbles to begin with because of Kettles Yard, you know, what I call the Louvre of the Pebble, and the way that Jim Ede used pebbles everywhere there. And there’s a general cult of the pebble, and then I wrote that, all those sentences attacking the pebble as such, which was quite pleasing to do. But also I see you can use the pebble, but maybe a pebble with words on it is in some way ennobled, it becomes not the only pebble on the beach let’s say. And, I have to say also there was a certain slightly wicked thing that because there was the cult of the pebble, and because if you went on about pebbles, collected pebbles, and put them in pots, bowls, all this kind of thing, I wanted to tease this to some extent. But yes, the pebbles are form, like the cards are form, the prints are form, the pebbles are form, the stone cubes are form, everything that is, its own legitimate possibility, and to see that is the pleasure of it.
And what about the particular forms of lettering that you are drawn to? I mean obviously it comes out of the whole aesthetic and philosophy behind the work; can you just talk about that a little bit?
Not really, just in the obvious way, that there’s good lettering, there’s bad lettering, I like to work with people who can.....
[End of Track 14: Tape 7: Side B] Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 15: Tape 8: Side A Page 1 Track 15: Tape 8: Side A
Oh yes, who can...I like to work with people who can do good lettering. There’s not so many of them, but bit by bit I’ve built up an acquaintance with a little group of people, not maybe as many as I would like but enough to manage.
But for instance, it’s very marvellous in your pieces, the way the Roman U becomes V. There isn’t a U is there?
No, that’s thanks to...yes, that, I just used that, or noticed that, yes, yes.
But very many times the shape of the lettering is echoing the meaning.
Yes, I hope so. But on the other hand I don’t really use lettering in an expressionist kind of way; I mean, when you would work with people, they sometimes would think that it would be nice if a sentence was about a wave, then they would make wavy lettering, sort of thing, but I would have to explain to them that that’s not really what’s wanted.
But it’s also that by using the tradition of the inscription, that’s also a kind of officialdom and a distancing ingredient that comes in, isn’t it?
Well, the inscription is another form, like the card or whatever, and it has its own possibilities, and those possibilities are not at all limited to what was done with the inscription in the past. You have to always enlarge the possibilities in it, particularly the thing that you’re doing.
But I suppose it inevitably has a civic connotation normally doesn’t it, I mean it’s very rare really in another context, comparatively rare.
Yes, I mean I have a certain attitude to what I call public art, and I feel that one of the troubles of our time is that public art is very often just personal art which has no place really in the public domain, and that public art ought to be to some extent even complacent.
But what do you feel for instance about things like the Eric Gill reliefs on places like the BBC building and...?
Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 15: Tape 8: Side A Page 2 Well, I cannot think that Gill is a great sculptor really. I know that he is greatly admired still, but there’s a certain kind of heraldic, allegorical quality that is not so pleasing. But his lettering is very good, and his sculpture is acceptable let’s say, but I cannot think it is the highest kind of sculpture. I like his wood-cuts, or wood engravings, whatever they were, they were pleasing, and some of his drawings are very nice. Yes, he’s OK, but his sculpture is not great, it’s not the highest quality, but very suitable in public places I think.
And we talked yesterday about Eros and Peter Pan; I mean are there other public sculptures that you are very fond of?
I can’t think off-hand, but a new one by an artist whose work I don’t really like usually very much, and that’s David Mach’s railway train, have you seen it, or photos of it? Wonderful. It’s a railway train from the Jubilee time, 1937 or ’38, what it was, I can’t remember, but I remember, it’s a streamlined steam train, and it’s built in brick, and it’s at...I can’t remember, is it Darlington or Swindon, or some place where they had railways anyway. And I think it’s wonderful work, really wonderful. Yes, I mean people can still make good public works, but in general I think that they are awful, really awful.
Do you have religious feelings, in a...?
Yes, of course.
I don’t mean in the wider sense, which is of course...but I mean you don’t have any formal religion do you?
No, no, no.
So what do you think happens to us?
[laughs] I mean that’s [inaudible] not a fitting question.
But are you hopeful about it?
No, I’m quite gloomy about it, quite gloomy about it.
But in the sense of nullity or in the sense of punishment? Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 15: Tape 8: Side A Page 3
No, not in a sense of punishment; in the sense of nullity, yes. Yes. I’d be sad when I can’t hear the rain on the roof, such things, I really will miss that, so to speak. Yes, there’s a lot in the world that’s quite pleasing.
Apart from the rain, what...?
Well I would fancy having a radio-controlled model Spitfire, but I don’t suppose I’ll ever have one, but there’s quite a lot of things that I would like to have that I know I’ll never have because you can only manage a certain amount in your life, and...yes. But there’s a lot of things that it would be nice to dream of having.
What else?
Well I always fancied having a boat with a cabin that you could go down into the cabin and drink a cup of tea in, and when I first made the loch in here, if I’d had the money I would have bought a boat with a cabin because I was in, a state I sometimes get into, and I didn’t really see what size the loch was, and I could imagine it as being very very large, and now unfortunately I more tend to see what size it is, and a boat with a cabin that you could drink tea in would be a little out of place on it. But it was a very real dream to me for a long time, yes.
Oh that’s lovely. And were you ever gripped by the Russian Revolution?
Not so much. When I was wee I had a very big book on it, with a wonderful photo of that man with the flag conducting the factory whistle symphony from the rooftop. Things like this I used to... Yes, and I really liked Tatlin, people like that very much. But later when I was more grown-up, it really was the French Revolution that gripped me, I take that as being the archetypal revolution.
And when did you first start knowing about the French Revolution?
Oh quite a wee while ago. When I started doing things away from here, when the works were away from here and I had to work with commercial firms and things like that, and became aware of how everything was dominated by, well just clichéd, but I really experienced it, the domination of time and money, and the setting aside of standards in order to make money; the casualness about the integrity of material forms. All this was what started me on the Revolution. Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 15: Tape 8: Side A Page 4
Directly relating it to what was happening to you?
Oh absolutely, yes yes, because I saw the need for a revolution, that shouldn’t be a battle to get a brick wall built properly, it shouldn’t be a battle to get a bench put in place properly. All these things became battles because of the time, money.
But by this time you had read about the French Revolution. I mean did you learn about it early in life?
Well I had heard of it, but it wasn’t until I came up against these problems, which were also related to the complete secularisation of society and everything. Then I read about the French Revolution avidly, like avidly, it was so real to me, totally real.
And did you...I mean you were obviously looking, if you were genuinely thinking there could be a revolution now, you were looking for a precedent?
Well I never, I had never...I mean you could say that of course there couldn’t be a revolution now, but I was never in life worried really about what was possible. I mean as I say, like, I would have been quire prepared to have a boat with a cabin floating on my loch, and I was quite prepared to take on the Sheriff Officer and the warrant sale. Everybody told me, don’t do it, you can’t get away with it, and so on, but I wasn’t really worried by that, I thought that you could, and I think one of the reasons that people are often annoyed at me is that they think, well I have expectations, or used to have expectations which they thought were unreasonable, but which often could come true, because of my not being sceptical or something like that. People would always say, ‘Oh you couldn’t do that’. And I would think, but you could, what’s to stop you? You see. And this was, yes, kind of, like making this garden, I had no money, I mean I started, I had no lawnmower, nothing, but it somehow came about, because I didn’t see how impossible it was to do it.
And when we were briefly talking about the great sort of public feeling that followed Diana’s death, you had said, unfortunately you don’t think that there’s going to be a revolution, but there was the sense of some possibility.
No, I think I also said, now, that you saw something...no, till then I’ve always thought. I mean, I never thought that there was going to be a guillotine in George Square, Edinburgh, or anything like this, and, I mean people...people used to say to Ian Hamilton Finlay C466/14 Track 15: Tape 8: Side A Page 5 me, ‘What’s your political programme?’ and things like this. And I never, I never ask myself such questions.
But did you have, supposing there had been a revolution, ideally what would you have liked to have grown from it, what would have been the society?
Oh, a society where there is esteem, cultivation of modesty, wholesomeness, simplicity, goodness, all those kind of things, that’s what I like. What is exemplified by, say, an old-fashioned Scottish fishing boat, is a good kind of thing, like, I mean, they are wholesome, they are harmonious, they’re modest, they go about a useful task, this kind of thing is what I would like, is the revolution I want. And that goes with the ideals of the Jacobins. [laughs] Are you all right? Why do you look at me like that? Don’t you believe it?
Yes, no I think it’s very beautifully put.
Well, that’s what I, that’s what I would, the revolution I would have liked, yes.
[End of Track 15: Tape 8: Side A]
[End of Interview]