A Paean of Self-Praise

...It is always my poetry, my ideas, my friends that are the best...

...Reviewed by BASIL BURWELL Author, "A Fool in the Forest" That a man can be a dangerous fool and still be a distinguished poet is one of the commonplaces of literary criticism...

...The trouble with these and the several other character sketches is that we come away feeling that the only character we have really been in touch with is Hugh MacDiarmid, and he is not what we might usually think of as an attractive character...

...If he has lost this lightness, he has not altogether lost his capacity as a poet...

...Sounds like O'Casey himself...

...A glow does come whenever he mentions pubs, and there is the memorable moment when the Mac-Diarmids awoke one morning to hear tiny hoof beats overhead and discovered a sheep had climbed up a crusty snowdrift onto the roof of their highland cottage...

...MacDiarmid is, nevertheless, a self-proclaimed Communist—the kind who would probably be liquidated on Tuesday if Great Britain went Communist on Monday...

...Most of the time, however, he is demonstrating over and over that he sees in those he admires images and aspects of himself, and that he views all others as inferior people who cannot possibly appreciate the illuminated bust of Hugh MacDiarmid by Benno Schotz, R. S. A., that now graces the reception chamber of Broadcasting House in Glasgow...

...Entering politics actively, he stood for Parliament as a Communist only to be defeated by Sir Alec Douglas-Home...

...MacDiarmid has travelled widely, though largely in Communist countries...

...He has been a busy man...

...and the heroic labor leader John MacLean...

...His best friends, he writes, "are all part of an intellectual elite...

...But the delightful passages are few...

...It is regrettable that we cannot go on talking about his poetry, but our business is with The Company I've Kept...

...Were you a vision o' mysel', Transmuted by the mellow liquor...

...He has also been a justice of the peace...

...Let me quote two stanzas of "The Looking Glass": The munelicht's like a lookin'-glass, The thistle's like mysel', But whaur ye've gane, my bonnie lass, Is mair than I can tell...

...The book is one long self-advertisement, one long paean of self-praise...

...Educated at Langholm Academy and Edinburgh University, from which he holds an honorary LLD, he spent 20 years as a journalist in Scotland, England and Wales...

...Not too busy to turn out a double-handful of vigorous poems...

...One watches him blow and blow and wonders what will happen to him when the giant balloon bursts...

...Such a man is that most prominent of Scots Nationalists, Hugh MacDiarmid, who says of himself, "I have been hailed in many quarters as the greatest Scottish poet since Burns," and goes on in his new book to quote critic after critic to prove his point...

...They range from literary personalities such as O'Casey and Ezra Pound (strange bedfellows) to the philosopher, architect and educationalist, Sir Patrick Geddes...

...Apt as the Karaunas by diabolic arts To produce darkness and obscure the light of day...

...There is his discussion of O'Casey, for example, where for a moment or two the prose and the man come vividly to life: "He could grab a man out of the streets by his yellow muffler or his drooping moustache, and shake gorgeous comedy out of him, making every cut of his jib leap out of the rhythms of his speech, tagging a man to his navel by the way he spits or paws his face with his hands...

...There is a long and rewarding essay on the musical genius, Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji...

...A late poem to Dylan Thomas is one of his finest...

...He served in the Royal Medical Corps and the Indian Medical Service in World War I, and during World War II he qualified as a precision fitter in a war plant before serving as First Engineer on a Norwegian vessel chartered by the British Admiralty...

...the social-credit economist Major Douglas...

...One can infer, though, that over a glass or two in an Edinburgh pub he may be vastly entertaining when he gets to spinning yarns...

...As Christopher Murray Grieve (his real name), MacDiarmid has had a vigorous and varied life quite apart from his poetry...

...and, shamefully and outrageously, the general public ignores them and fails to appreciate them...

...Everything is dead except stupidity here...

...He was one of the founders of the Scottish Nationalist party, and he effected almost single-handed, we are told, a literary revolution in Scotland...

...Neist time 1 glisk you in a glass, Tse warrant Til mak' siccar...

...The book does have occasional rewards...

...Hear him on that great slum Glasgow: The houses are Glasgow, not the people—these Are simply the food the houses live and grow on Endlessly, drawing from their vulgarity And pettiness and darkness of spirit —Gorgonizing the mindless generations, Turning them all into filthy property...

...In The Company I've Kept, MacDiarmid acquaints us with many of these friends...

...To see or hear a clock in Glasgow's horrible, Like seeing a dead man's watch, still going though he's dead...

...He is more consistently successful in some of his earlier, less didactic poetry, where a wry humor that seems gone from him now hums in the lines like bees in heather...

...He despises the masses and describes the majority of Communists as "legalistic line-toers...

...It is a sad thing to see any man, let alone a fine poet, inflating his own image...

...There are magnificent lines in this fragment, but one wishes MacDiarmid knew when to leave a strong image alone and not qualify it to death...