Although Norman MacCaig vigorously disowned the cruder varieties of nationalism and regionalism ("My only country / is six feet high / and whether I love it or not / I'll die / for its independence"), more than most poets he was highly sensitive to places. In particular, two parts of Scotland form the background or the subject for much of his work: the city of Edinburgh and the Highland area of Assynt. It's tempting and totally misleading to set them up as polar opposites, even though in poems like Centres of centres (1973), he appears to struggle with this before resolving it, acknowledging the need to see his surroundings "with a multiple eye".
|
| Edinburgh in the rain: from the National Museum of Scotland webcam |
The capital of Scotland is a city of around 500 000 people, lying between the Firth of Forth to the north and the Pentland Hills to the south. It's a city of contrasts and opposing pairs: the medieval Old Town and the Georgian New Town; the international tourism and cultural centre with a darker current of history which includes Deacon Brodie (the inspiration for Jekyll and Hyde), the murderers Burke and Hare and, more recently, one of Britain's worst drugs and AIDS problems.
Despite its self-appointed role as the literary hub of Scotland, Edinburgh has produced surprisingly few major writers. Besides MacCaig, the most obvious names are those of novelist and poet Robert Louis Stevenson, detective author Arthur Conan Doyle, and novelist Walter Scott. More recently, the best-known writer is probably Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting.
For much of his life, MacCaig lived in Tollcross, near the centre, and in the 1950s and 1960s he was part of the group of writers who were associated with the pubs of Rose Street in the New Town (some time before Rose Street became the trendy and more sanitised place it is today). In his poetry, though, the most recurring presence is the Old Town: the area of narrow wynds and closes (passages) extending around the Canongate and High Street. Despite the invasion of tourists and tartan, parts of the Old Town still possess a direct link to a time "dark as the stairs and closes of the Canongate / and the West Bow. They small of piss / that used to smell of piss and pomanders / and are gothic and gloomy enough / for a weak mind / to hallucinate the shadows / with shades". And at the same time, the poet recognises and, somehow, resolves in himself a reflection of the split city: "divided amicably between / my romantic my classical / my Gothic my Georgian / my orchestral my plainsong / me."
 |
Assynt, in the north-west Highlands, is (to the average Central Belt mind) one of the more remote parts of mainland Scotland. The landscape is characterised by the highly glaciated red standstone and metamorphic rocks which make up the mountains, and give them their variety of spectacular shapes — although few reach the Munro height of 3000 feet, some (Stac Pollaidh, Suilven) are among the classic walkers' hills in Scotland.
In common with much of the Highlands, Assynt suffered during the Clearances (the best-remembered local laird was the infamous Duke of Sutherland) and there are enduring grievances against absentee landlords and "the indifference / of a remote and ignorant government". In common with the Western Isles and other parts of the West Coast, it is one of the remaining strongholds of the Gaelic language and culture: also like these areas, unemployment and a declining population are serious concerns.
A huge amount of MacCaig's poetry is driven by his love of the country: both the spectacular landscape and the people. In his longest poem, A man in Assynt (see here for an extract), he describes both, following the history of the region from "glaciers, grinding west" in the last Ice Age, to the hope that "that other ebb, / that sad withdrawal of people, may, too, / reverse itself and flood / the bays and the sheltered glens / with new generations..."
More about Assynt can be found on the Assynt Tourism Group site. A detailed discussion of MacCaig's relationship with the Highland landscape is to be found in an essay available here.