1971

Scotland’s first official Makar in modern times, Edwin Morgan (1920–2010), was endlessly inventive, inquiring, energetic, internationalist and deeply committed to his home city of Glasgow. The first of his books to be published by Carcanet was a collection of translations of V.V. Mayakovsky’s poems into Scots, Wi’ the Haill Voice (1971). Thereafter Carcanet was his principal publisher for poetry, essays and drama.1 His letters were both business-like and playful, and his own immaculate archive of copies and replies was drawn on to compile The Midnight Letterbox: selected correspondence 1950–2010, edited by James McGonigal and John Coyle (2015). His presence on the list attracted other Scottish poets, of his own generation and younger. He wrote to the young man he had fallen in love with at seventy-eight: ‘Sailing into calmer waters, writing Tempests, composing last quartets, taking a deckchair into the garden – no, that doesn’t seem to be me.’2 Two years later, in 2000, the year that saw the publication of his New Selected Poems, the performance and publication of A.D. a trilogy on the life of Jesus Christ, and his translation of Jean Racine’s Phaedra, he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

FROM MICHAEL SCHMIDT

8 November 1971


Dear Mr Morgan,


Your essay came today – many, many thanks. It is the only essay I have received for the book which I find exactly as I would have wished – it is exciting to read, larded with excellent quotation, and in every way my sort of essay.3 I only wish you had planted yourself in the landscape you so beautifully conjure. We’ll have you later writ large.

      The rest of the book is almost complete excepting two essays still tardy, so you were not last. I feel the book is attaining a completeness at long last and pray it will be ready for Herr Printer on December 15th. Which is two months later than I’d hoped, but the span of time was painfully short, wasn’t it.

      You will, in the book, especially like Anne Cluysenaar’s piece about Steiner and the poets who refute him in practice; and Terry Eagleton’s piece on myth and legend.4 Jon Silkin’s piece on Geoff Hill is a little heavy going but very good, I think. I am not too keen on a piece we have about Bunting – but then, I am not at ALL keen on Bunting, which may help explain things.

      I was stunned by the MacCaig you quoted.5 What a superb poem. I will have to go back to him again. I liked but forgot him, which was silly. Scotland is producing exciting things. More so than any other ‘region’.

      Mr Garioch has ordered Wi’ the Haill Voice today.6 I think we must try to arrange a feature in The Scotsman about it, if only we knew whom to contact. They’ve always been warm about our books. Do you know the editor? Would Mr Garioch be a good person to ask about this?

      My goodness we are working hard. And yet I did today finally manage to find or make time to get a poem down. And it was good! It’s a relief that the service of letters has not lamed me for lettering!

      Again, a multitude of thanks for your excellent piece and for – believe it or not – your comparative promptness!


Ever,
Michael


      Did I send you the catalogue? It is quite impressive – if you haven’t seen it I’ll send it.



FROM EDWIN MORGAN

Glasgow

20 November 1971


Dear Michael,


Needless to say I am enormously pleased that the article was on time and acceptable. Even not being last of all – well now. I shall look forward to reading the pieces you mention. Bunting is also not one of my absolute favourites, though I can see he has a gluey music all his own – but I like a verse that moves.7 It is not enough to have images, fine though many of them certainly are. On the other hand, his quirky crabbitness is also a ‘northernness’ and in some moods this attracts just because at least it is not smooth.

      How nice of Robert Garioch to order a Mayakovsky already. I would undoubtedly value his opinion on it eventually. But if you were to try to ask him to review it this might be taken as backscratching since we are both editorial advisors on Scottish International. If he reviews it somewhere unasked, fine. The Scotsman idea is worth pursuing. Probably you should write to Robert Nye, who is the literary editor.8 He is not himself Scotch, but is well-disposed to Scottish poetry (and I believe to Carcanet) and might well be interested in a feature of some kind.

      I have a promise of a review in Soviet Studies (a quarterly edited from Glasgow University) if you will send a copy when the time comes to Dr Alan Ross, Department of International Economic Studies, University of Glasgow.

      Could you please make two small changes in my typescript of the Scottish Poetry essay: Page 7 line 20 – for vehement read forceful, and page 9 line 13 for period read decade.

      From my window I am watching the snow flittering down past the orange streetlamps like – like – come on Bunting – like


doom-grated

orange-peel

purified through

fine fans

etc.

Yours ever

Edwin

(do please drop the Mr!)

      P.S. I nearly forgot: yes, thanks, I did receive your fine catalogue!



FROM EDWIN MORGAN

Glasgow

4 December 1971


Dear Michael,


Thank you very much for page proofs and two letters. On going through the proofs I found a fair number of corrections and I’m enclosing the relevant sheets – I hope there will still be time to make these changes as some of them are quite bad – especially the contents page – whatever happened there?

      I’d like to have the next Karcanet batch and enclose my cheque for the paperback edition. For consistency I should have written chekue. Two possible subscribers (unless you already have them) might be my two co-editors of Scottish Poetry – George Bruce (Fellow in Creative Writing, Glasgow University) and Maurice Lindsay [address]…9

      Yes, I wish I could have seen the Amalrik plays – perhaps you can tell me what they are like in due course.10 On Tuesday I hope to go to a massive Stockhausen jamboree which the university music department are sponsoring. Perhaps you saw the article in today’s Times about violence and crime in Glasgow – not untrue, of course, but I can’t help feeling that the headline STOCKHAUSEN CONCERT A SELLOUT IN GLASGOW UNIVERSITY’S HUGE BUTE HALL is unlikely to make the English papers though it is also true and might help to alter our – what is the word, oh yes, image.

Best as ever,

Edwin


*


I must have come across Edwin Morgan, as I did so many poets and translators in the early years, by the kind agency of Daniel Weissbort, the founder-editor with Ted Hughes of Modern Poetry in Translation, with whom I had undertaken to edit the Carcanet modern translations list. He no doubt had Morgan’s implausible translations of Mayakovsky into Scots, one of the earliest of our translation titles, along with Danny’s own versions of Natalia Gorbanevskaya, Poems, the Trial, Prison. Gorbanevskaya was a dissident poet held in a Soviet prison mental hospital, her poems and a transcript of her trial having been spirited out of the country. Mayakovsky was quite another kettle of fish. When we published Wi’ the Haill Voice, C.P. Snow noted in the Financial Times that he found the translations ‘marginally more difficult than the Russian originals’.

      Morgan when I first knew him was a committed avoider of the conventional. He had radical energy, an instinct for using language as subversion, keeping readers on their toes formally and semantically, teasing them with etymology, sound properties, echoes, and with unexpected formal resources. His commitment to European rather than AngloAmerican modernisms set him apart not only from his British contemporaries but also from Scottish predecessors except for MacDiarmid, whom he respected, and W.S. Graham and Burns Singer.

      We had a cheerful and open friendship, exchanging dozens of letters and even collaborating on what we called ‘Dovetails’ but were published as Grafts (Mariscat, 1984). When they were published, in a note Edwin explicitly rejected the term ‘collaboration’: ‘These poems are based on fragments from abandoned poems by Michael Schmidt. They grew round the fragments, which were kept intact but might appear in any part of the completed poem. There was no collaboration; I merely used the alien material as if the lines (as often happens) had suddenly floated into my head.’

      His discomfort with the idea of collaborating with me had a specific origin. When I became friends with Donald Davie and C.H. Sisson and my close association with C.B. Cox and the University of Manchester were known, this strong English, Modernist and in various ways conservative association put my relations with Edwin, as with Douglas Dunn and other close early contacts, under strain. Edwin did not contribute to PN Review until 1998. The bulk of his contributions, the ‘Translator’s Notebook’ series, edited by James McGonigal, appeared well after his death. Yet we remained regular correspondents and friends at one remove, as it were, and Carcanet published more than a score of his books of poems, plays, essays and translations, with thirteen of them still in print.


NOTES

  1. On 29 December 1971, MNS wrote to Morgan: ‘Just a note at the year’s turning to wish you a happy new one, and to thank you for the very beautiful card and the very wonderful poem it contained. It was a superb poem, and it suddenly dawned on me that I don’t know your work except in anthology. Do you have any copies, or can you tell me where I can get copies, of your books? Who “does” you?’ Morgan had published with a variety of small presses at this stage; his breakthrough volume A Second Life (1968) had been published by Edinburgh University Press.
  2. Letter quoted in James McGonigal, Beyond the Last Dragon: a life of Edwin Morgan (Sandstone Press, 2010), p.370.
  3. The essay referred to here, ‘Scottish Poetry in the 1960s’ was published in British Poetry Since 1960: a critical survey (eds Grevel Lindop and Michael Schmidt, Carcanet, 1972).
  4. Anne Cluysenaar (1936–2014) was a Belgian-born poet and teacher, who lived much of her life in the UK, latterly in Wales. Carcanet published two collections of her poems, Double Helix (1982) and Timeslips: new and selected poems (1997).
  5. Norman MacCaig (1910–96), Scottish poet, of whom Morgan wrote: ‘Short on alienation, but surprising, accurate, and well turned, his poetry offers many pleasures. Its urbanity is by no means unable to get under the skin…’ (‘Scottish Poetry in the 1960s’, Essays, 1974, p.181).
  6. Robert Garioch (1909–81), poet and translator, edited the anthology of contemporary Scottish poetry Made in Scotland for Carcanet (1974) and Carcanet reissued his Collected Poems in 1980.
  7. Basil Bunting (1900–85), a modernist poet whose high reputation was established with the publication of Briggflatts in 1966. Morgan wrote a playful elegy for him, ‘A Trace of Wings’ (Themes on a Variation, 1988).
  8. Robert Nye (1939-2016), poet, novelist and critic, edited selections of poems by William Barnes and Laura Riding for Carcanet, as well as English Sermons 1750-1850 (1976). Carcanet published Nye’s Collected Poems in 1998.
  9. George Bruce (1909-2002), Scottish poet and BBC radio producer; Maurice Lindsay (1918-2009), Scottish poet, broadcaster and cultural historian, who edited the landmark anthology Modern Scottish Poetry: An Anthology of the Scottish Renaissance, 1920-1945 (Faber and Faber, 1946). Carcanet published a much-revised edition in 1976.
  10. Andrei Amalrik (1938–80), Soviet dissident dramatist, who was at this time serving a prison sentence in a labour camp in Kolyma. He was famous in the West for his essay Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? and his account of his first exile, Involuntary Journey to Siberia, published abroad in 1970.

THE YEAR IN BOOKS


      Michael Cayley, Moorings

      Elizabeth Daryush, Verses: Seventh Book, preface by Roy Fuller

      H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Tribute to Freud, introduction by Peter Jones

      Margaret Newlin, The Fragile Immigrants

      Anthony Rudolf, The Manifold Circle

      Val Warner, These Yellow Photos

      Daniel Weissbort, The Leaseholder