Sorley Maclean's "An Cuilithionn": a Critical Assessment Chrtistopher Whyte

Studies in Scottish Literature Volume 35 | Issue 1 Article 40 2007 Sorley MacLean's "An Cuilithionn": A Critical Assessment Chrtistopher Whyte Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Whyte, Chrtistopher (2007) "Sorley MacLean's "An Cuilithionn": A Critical Assessment," Studies in Scottish Literature: Vol. 35: Iss. 1, 508–525. Available at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol35/iss1/40 This Article is brought to you by the Scottish Literature Collections at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in Scottish Literature by an authorized editor of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Christopher Whyte Sorley MacLean's "An Cuilithionn": A Critical Assessment The long poem Sorley MacLean wrote between spring and the end of 1939, taking its title from the mountain range on the Isle of Skye that consti tutes its central image, has not so far been the focus of sustained critical atten tion. The fact that a wide range of manuscript and typed materials relating to the poem, divided between the University libraries of Aberdeen and St An drews and the National Library of Scotland, has now come into the public do main, makes initial reconnoitering and assessment of the poem particularly urgent. In a separate essay on the emergence of the text, I argue that it is use ful to posit three different versions or states of "An Cuilithionn."J The earliest is the Gaelic text in MacLean's hand lodged in Aberdeen, containing a small but significant number of lines not preserved elsewhere.2 The middle version ISee Christopher Whyte, "SorIey MacLean's 'An Cuilithionn': The Emergence of the Text," in Wilson McLeod, James E. Fraser & Anja GunderIoch, eds. Canan & Cultar: Lan guage and Culture: Rannsachadh na Gaidhlig, 3 (2006), 111-27. Preparatory research for both essays benefited from an award by the Advanced Humanities Research Board. 2See the small black loose-leaf notebook in MS 2864 in Special Collections at Aberdeen University Library. For a fuller account of the Aberdeen materials, see Christopher Whyte, "SorIey MacLean's Dain do Eimhir: New Light from the Aberdeen Holdings," in Michel Byrne, Thomas Owen Clancy & Sheila Kidd, eds. Litreachas & Eachdraidh: Rannsachadh na Gaidhlig 2 Glaschu 2002 / Literature & History: Papers from the Second Conference of Scot tish Gaelic Studies Glasgow 2002 (Glasgow, 2006), pp. 183-99. Sorley MacLean's "An Cuilithionn": A Critical Assessment 509 never reached definitive form, given that plans to publish the poem in the wake of MacLean's love sequence the Diiin do Eimhir failed to materialize. It would embrace the materials lodged in Edinburgh,3 with passages marked for deletion, corrections and substitutions, as well as the fair copy of both the Gaelic text and MacLean's English translation which was bound on Douglas Young's orders and lodged in St Andrews.4 Detailed comments by Dugald McColl on an early draft of MacLean's English translation, along with mar ginal observations in Robin Lorimer's hand on the typed fair copy of this translation, offer fascinating insights into the reception of the poem when it was still in this fluctuating state of becoming.5 The third version is that which appeared in five successive issues of the literary magazine Chapman where, with the benefit of nearly half a century's hindsight, MacLean allowed "what I think tolerable of it" to be published between 1987 and 1989. For the I'urposes of the present essay, the poem will be identified with this third version,6 though towards the close I will have something to say about how far this initial, tenta tive assessment holds, or requires modification, when set against the earlier versions. Because it is natural and reassuring to proceed from the known to the un known, there is a temptation to view "An Cuilithionn" against the background of Diiin do Eimhir, the greater part of which was written between September 1939 and April 1940. It would however be wise to resist such a temptation, given the extraordinary originality of MacLean's project in "An Cuilithionn." One of the pleasures the love sequence offers its readers is the rich intertextu ality it sets in motion. MacLean was able to channel into his own poetic crea tions a vast range of reading, from the Latin poets of the Augustan era through the Proven~al troubadours, the Italians of the dolce stU nuovo and the English metaphysicals (all three mediated to a certain extent by their rediscovery at the hands of the Modernists), to Baudelaire and European Symbolism, not forget ting the fundamental role ascribed to Shakespeare's sonnets and to the poetry of Yeats. A deliberate effect of this intertextuality was to "re-enfranchise" Gaelic lyrical poetry within the wider European context. Readers are con stantly surprised to experience this kind of centrality in a sequence written in a language which had been relegated to a marginal position at least since the 3MSS 29558, 29559, 29560. 4St Andrews University Library Muniments Dep 17. 5These materials can be consulted in the National Library of Scotland MS 29559. ~e text is quoted from the collected volume Somhairle MacGill-Eain/Sorley MacLean o Choille gu Bearradh / From Wood to Ridge (Manchester and Edinburgh, 1999). MacLean's remark is on p. 63. Line numbers, absent from the printed text, are here preceded by a Roman numeral indicating which Part or "Earrann" of the poem the passage comes from. 510 Christopher Whyte time of the Renaissance.,,7 "An Cuilithionn," on the other hand, taken as a whole, never quite sounds like anything else. If MacLean's passionate devo tion to traditional Gaelic song is evident throughout the love sequence, then in "An Cuilithionn" Gaelic material is frequently refracted through a kind of nostalgic parody. When one recognizes deliberate echoes, as in the monologue of the Gesto girl kidnapped and transported to America on the Slave Ship,s the implicit tenderness is accompanied by a sense of something irrevocably lost, making MacLean's approach not dissimilar to that of European Decadent poets such as Laforgue or Corbiere, with their distorted, barrel-organ like "remem bered harmonies.,,9 The writing of "An Cuilithionn" was dovetailed or interleaved with that of the sequence, in the course of what was undoubtedly an annus mirabilis for MacLean's poetry. "An Cuilithionn," he tells Douglas Young, was broken off about two thirds of the way through Part II, before the "Seo latha eile" sec tions. lO The interruption was caused by MacLean's renewing acquaintance with a Scottish woman he had known as a girl. She would become the domi nating figure in the Eimhir sequence. Lyrics addressed to her, and to an Irish woman to whom he never declared his love, flowed from his pen starting in September, and it was only in November that he resumed work on "An Cuilithionn." The pace of writing, while MacLean was teaching evacuated children in Hawick in the Scottish Borders, at the same time making frequent visits to Edinburgh, was impressive. He tells Young that "there was a short break between the end of Part II and the beginning of Part III and then again after the end of Part IV and again after [the] end of Part VI." Despite these brief interruptions, the poem as a whole, running to more than 1600 lines, had th been completed by December 20 , when MacLean received the fateful letter from the Scottish woman telling him their relationship could never reach ful fillment. The sole exception was the "Co seo" sequence constituting the last 36 lines, "composed in bed in Raasay in the early hours of Jan[uary] 1st 1940." 7The annotated edition published as one of its annual volumes by the Association of Scot tish Literary Studies attempts to do justice to these aspects of the sequence. See Christopher Whyte ed. Sornhairle MacGill-Eaini Sorley MacLean Dain do Eimhir (Glasgow, 2002). 8See VI, 1-70. <>nus approach is developed in my essay "MacLean and Modernism: 'Remembered Har monies'" in John M. Kirk & Donall P. 6 Baoill, eds., Legislation, Literature and Sociolin guistics: Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and Scotland. Belfast Studies in Lan guage, Culture and Politics, 13 (2005), 86-102. lOSee the "Dating Letter" quoted in Dain do Eimhir pp. 138ff, where MacLean also dis closes that "the 'Ann an talla' lyric: at I, 91 ff. had been "written in Mull in the spring of 1938" and was subsequently incorporated in the poem. Sorley MacLean's "An Cuilithionn": A Critical Assessment 511 The incantatory, almost drugged quality of the peroration may owe something to the poet's feverish state at the time. He tells Young that he "had a bad throat" and had taken to bed "immediately the New Year was in." But had "An Cuilithionn" really been completed? When he published the peroration in 1970, in Gaelic in the quarterly Gairm and in English in an issue of Lines Review specially devoted to his work,11 MacLean presented it as the conclusion of a long poem which had been brusquely interrupted in December 1939. Nonetheless, the poet's pronouncements about his work deserve to be treated with a degree of caution. As will become evident, the peroration pro vides a suitable conclusion to what has gone before, and the poem as a whole, especially in the form in which it finally reached the public, shows clear signs of planning and of careful, consistent structuring. In twelve prefatory lines, which may be described as a dedication, Mac Lean placed "An Cuilithionn" beneath the twin patronage of Hugh MacDiar mid and the eighteenth-century Gaelic master poet Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, also known as Alexander MacDonald.

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