Appendix: Glossary for 'On a Raised Beach' Adamantine: Made of or resembling adamant; as hard as a diamond. Aesthesis: Perception of the external world by the senses. Angle-titch: Earthworm. Arris: An external angle, sharp edge, or ridge. Ataraxia: Impassiveness, freedom from passion. Auxesis: Enlargement or exaggeration for effect; amplification; gradual increase in intensity of meaning. Ayre: Low-lying strip of land, usually between loch and sea. Bakka: (Icelandic) A bank or ridge. Bistre: A dark-brown colour. Braird: (Scots) To sprout; germinate. Bricole: A medieval engine for throwing stones or darts. Burr: A rough ridge or edge. Caaba: Venerated shrine of Mecca, enclosing a sacred black stone, said to be a ruby brought from heaven. Cabirian: Ancient, secret mystery rites. Cadrans: A wooden instrument for measuring the angle at which a facet of stone is to be ground. Caen-stone: A lightish-yellow building-stone. Cairn: Mound or heap of stones erected for a memorial or mark. Carpolite: Fossil or petrified fruit. Catasta: A bed of torture. Cavo-rilievo: A style of relief in which the highest portions of the figures are on a level with the general surface. Celadon: A pale shade of green. 213 214 Appendix Chatoyant: Having a changeable, undulating, or floating lustre. Chiliad: A thousand. Christophanic: Pertaining to an appearance of Christ to humans, as after his death. Coigns: Projecting comers or angles. Corbeau: A very dark green. Cyathiform: Cup-shaped. de Bary: A nineteenth century German botanist. Diallage: (Rhetorical) Presentation of an argument from various points of view, all brought to bear on one point; also, a grass-green variety of pyroxene of lamellar or foliated structure. Deictic: 'Proving directly', from Greek Deiktikos, to show. Ebrillade: A check of the bridle which a rider gives a horse, by jerking one rein, when it refuses to tum. Eburnation: Act or process of becoming hard and dense like ivory. Ecorche: Flayed. Enchorial: Of the country, as used in a particular country: of the Rosetta Stone -popular as opposed to hieroglyphic form of ancient Egyptian character. Encrinite: Fossil crinoid (lily-shaped echinoderms). Energumen: A 'possessed' person, one possessed by a demon. Enfouldered: Charged with thunderbolts, black as a thunder-cloud. Engouled: In the mouth of a beast. Entrochal: Pertaining to entrochi (wheel-like plates of which some crinoids are composed). Epanadiplosis: Rhetorical figure wherein a sentence begins and ends with the same word. Faculae: Small bright spots on the sun. Fescue: Straws or twigs used to point out letters for children learning to read. Fiducial: Firm, a fixed point from which measurements are made or to which positions are referred; trusting. Foraminous: Full of holes, porous. Foveoles: Small pits. Futhorc: The runic alphabet. Glaucous: Sea-green; pale bluish-green. Glout: To look sullen; a sullen look. Gloss: To elucidate; to explain; to glow, have a fair appearance. Gorgonises: Turns to stone; petrifies. Haecceity: 'Thisness'. Haptik: relating to the sense of touch (to lay hold of, touch, grasp). Appendix 215 Hellya: (Possibly from Icelandic 'bella') a flat stone. Hellyina bretta: (Icelandic) A flat stone turned upwards. Hellyina grt): (Icelandic) Rubble; broken stones. Hoar: White or grey. Hraun: (Icelandic) A rough place; bare rocks in the sea. Hvarf: (Icelandic) Tum around. Klett: (Icelandic) A rock; a cliff. Kolgref: (Icelandic) A charcoal pit. Lithogenesis: The process of production of rock. Lochia: Watery discharge following childbirth. Omnific: All-creating. Optik: Pertaining to sight. Ratchet: (Scots) Broken stone. Ruderal: Growing on or among stone or rubbish (rudera are fragments or ruins of a building). Rugas: Folds or wrinkles. Rupestrine: Found on or among rocks. Schwendener: A nineteenth-century German botanist responsible for the theory that a lichen is not an individual, but a composite plant made up of an algal host body and a parasitic fungus. Slickensides: Polished and scratched or striated rock surfaces. Striae: Narrow streaks, channels, or ridges. Tesserae: Small quadrilateral tablets of stone or glass. Truite: Having a delicately crackled surface. Notes CHAPTER I BORDERER AND EXILE I. Hugh MacDiarmid, Letter to Helen B. Cruickshank, 3 July 1933, Univen;ity of Edinburgh Library MS. Gen. 886, f. 22-3. 2. Personal interview with Valda Trevlyn. 3. Hugh MacDiarmid, Letter to William Soutar, 5 July 1933, National Library of Scotland MS. 8521. 4. ·Personal interview with Valda Trevlyn. 5. Personal interview with Michael Grieve. 6. Personal interview with Valda Trevlyn. 7. Hugh MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet (London, 1943; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972) p. 45. 8. Personal interview with Valda Trevlyn. 9. 'Braid Scots' refers to the Scottish vernacular in which MacDiarmid's early poetry was written. It is also referred to as 'Lallans' or the 'Doric'. It is distinct from both English, with which it shares most of its vocabulary, and Gaelic, which is the language of Celtic Scotland. 10. Hugh MacDiarmid, Letter to George Ogilvie, 6 January 1930, National Library of Scotland TS. 4540, f. 172. II. Hugh MacDiarmid, Letter to Helen B. Cruickshank, 14 June 1930, University of Edinburgh Library MS. Gen. 886. 12. Hugh MacDiarmid, Letter to Helen B. Cruickshank, 7 October 1930, University of Edinburgh Library MS. Gen. 886. 13. Personal interview with Valda Trevlyn. 14. MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet, p. 227. 15. Ibid., p. 219. 16. Ibid., p. 219. 17. Hugh MacDiarmid, 'My Native Place', Scots Observer (1931) rpt. in Selected Essays of Hugh MacDiarmid, ed. Duncan Glen (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1970) p. 53. 216 Notes to pp. 10-29 217 18. MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet, p. 3. 19. Ibid., p. 224. 20. Personal interview with James Caird. 21. Personal interview with Hugh MacDiarmid. The 'Wee Frees' are members of the Free Presbyterian Church, a strict and puritanical religion. 22. Norman MacCaig, Scottish poet and close friend of MacDiarmid. 23. Personal interview with Valda Trevlyn. 24. Ibid. 25. Personal interview with Morag Enticknap. 26. Hugh MacDiarmid, 'Andy', The Glasgow Herald(22 October 1927) rpt. in The Uncanny Scot, ed. Kenneth Buthlay (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968) p. 59. MacDiarmid tells the story of Andrew's dive briefly in Lucky Poet. 'Andy' is an elaboration of it, focusing on the autobiographical narrator's psychology. 27. MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet, p. 10. 28. George Ogilvie, The Broughton Magazine (1920) rpt. in Gordon Wright, MacDiarmid: An Illustrated Biography (Edinburgh: Gordon Wright Publishing, 1977) pp. 25-6. 29. Hugh MacDiarmid, Letter to George Ogilvie, 26 December 1920, National Library of Scotland MS. 4540, f. 85. 30. MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet, p. 40. 31. Ibid., p. 40 32. Hugh MacDiarmid, Letter to George Ogilvie, 1911, National Library of Scotland MS. 4540, If. 1-2. 33. Hugh MacDiarmid, Letter to George Ogilvie, 24 November 1918, National Library of Scotland MS. 4540, f. 38. 34. Hugh MacDiarmid, Letter to George Ogilvie, 24 December 1918, National Library of Scotland MS. 4540, If. 43--4. 35. Hugh MacDiarmid: No Fellow Travelers, film transcript, National Library of Scotland Ace. 6832, p. 1. 36. Hugh MacDiarmid, Complete Poems: 1920-1976, 2 volumes, Vol II (London: Martin Brian & O'Keeffe, 1978) p. 1202. All further quotations from MacDiarmid's poetry are taken from the Complete Poems. 37. 'A Conversation: Hugh MacDiarmid and Duncan Glen', recorded on 25 October 1968 (Preston, England: Akros Publications, 1970). 38. MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet, p. 397. 39. F. G. Scott, Letter to Hugh MacDiarmid, 31 December 1935, University of Edinburgh Library. 40. Personal interview with Walter Grieve. 41. Personal interview with James Caird. 42. Ibid. 43. MacDiarmid did not read Gaelic except for a few words and phrases. He worked from a prose translation by Sorley MacLean. 44. MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet, pp. 44-5. 45. Scottish Daily Express, quoted in Wright, p. 83. 46. Personal interview. 47. Personal interview with Walter Grieve. 48. Pibroch is the classical music of the Highland bagpipe. Lucky Poet was one part of a much longer biography. An unpublished section on 'my domestic 218 Notes to pp. 29-47 life, marriage, divorce, remarriage and my children by both mothers', was to be named 'Lament for the Children'. 49. Personal interview with Valda Trevlyn. CHAPTER 2 SANGSCHAW AND PENNY WHEEP I. MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet, p. 177. 2. 'Kailyard', literally 'cabbage patch', refers to a romanticized, escapist tradition of Scottish literature characterized by rural sentimentality, prevalent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. MacDiarmid saw the poetry of this school as a degenerate end of the Burns tradition. For a brief version of MacDiarmid's view of Burns's influence, see 'Robert Burns: His Influence', Selected Essays of Hugh MacDiarmid, pp. 177-82. 3. J. M. Barrie, from 'Scotland's Lament', quoted in Lucky Poet, p. 178. 4. Hugh MacDiarmid, 'Causerie', The Scottish Chapbook, 1, no. 3 (1922) 62. 5. 'Art and the Unknown', in Selected Essays, p. 44. 6. 'A Theory of Scots Letters', The Scottish Chapbook, 1, no. 8 (1922) 210. 7. The Scottish Chapbook, 2, no. 3 (1923) 63. 8. Kenneth Buthlay, 'Shibboleths of the Scots', Akros, 12, nos. 34-5 (August 1977) 36. 9. The Scottish Chapbook, 2, no. 3 (1923) 64. 10. Buthlay, 'Shibboleths of the Scots', 33. II. Lucky Poet, p. 324. 12. Ibid., p. xxiii. 13. Martin Heidegger, 'The Nature of Language', On The Way to Language (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) p. 65. 14. Ibid., p. 93. 15. J. K. Annand, 'The Vocabulary of Hugh MacDiarmid's Scots Poems', Akros, 12, nos. 34-5 (August 1977) 17. 16. According to William Tait, MacDiarmid had remarked to him that he had this literal meaning in mind though no one had then pointed it out. 17. Quoted in 'A Theory of Scots Letters', The Scottish Chapbook, 1, no. 7 (1922) 182. 18. Ibid., 182. 19. Edwin Morgan, Hugh MacDiarmid, Writers and Their Work (Longman House, Essex: Longman Group Ltd, 1976) p.