Alexander Hutchison
Hutchison was born in 1943, in Buckie, and I presume from his dialect that he was brought up in the north-east of Scotland. In 1966 he went to Canada to teach, which is probably why his first book (Deep-Tap Tree, 1978) was published in Massachusetts, but returned to Scotland in 1984, and has published a second book (The Moon-Calf, 1990) and a pamphlet (The Butchers, 1997). He is the most sophisticated of living Scottish poets, and it is a relief that this exhaustively refined writer uses (sometimes) the Scottish language for his overwhelming minimalism. He is missing from the relevant anthologies.
It is reasonable to link him to Imagism and to Pound, although that influence has been deeply transmuted by the passage of time. The translations of Ronsard and Catullus into (north-east) Scots may owe something to the example of Pound. The primary act, I would say, is the energetic erosion of anything stiff, familiar, or unnecessary, from the text; producing something which cannot be sung along to, which lacks the thump of pentameters, but in which every shape is unique, and which stills us because we can see that everything has been thought through and wrought. It is liberating to read, something like listening to a singer with perfect breath control or looking at a Chinese carving in ivory; the selfconsciousness of the working is a kind of rapture. Anything so slight and strong is a thing of wonder. All Eng Lit academics have verbal sophistication, but they are usually cynical as well; the quality which we enjoy in Hutchison, I take it, is his untroubled belief in the possibilities of poetry and the human intellect, the integrity of impulse which lasts through so much taking of pains. His poems are few in syllables, but contain great depths.
I find it difficult to relate Hutchison to north-east Scottish poetry, represented by Charles Murray or Flora Garry; he uses cweet, 'baith tumml'd catmaw/ glaur t'the cweets', which I only recall seeing in Flora Garry's poem "Dyl't lookin an'worth i'the queets"; this would be "cuit" in standard Scots. I would argue that the traditional hard-headedness and caution of north-easterners might have come out as scrupulous attentiveness, driven by pessimism about the drafts with the low numbers, in this patriotic scholar.
The poems in The Moon Calf belong to traditional oral genres of love poem and humour. In
Cack
an cabbrach
argy bargy
yammerin onding
maistly blaa
the laconic curtness disguises the topic, which is simply a blustering wind. Cabbrach is glossed as "a big, disagreeable, bad tempered person". (There may be an analogy to be drawn with CM Grieve, named in the next stanza as gash-gabbit.) Catmaw is a somersaut, and deals with the unclassical and undignified topic of two people falling head over heels in snow and mud. Some poems are close to the nonsense rhymes and sound-play of children:
Nothing but a mish-mash of morbid mud-babies,
all crust and no filling, doldrums and doggy-doo-
Jerkin and Larkin and farting around-an entourage
of entropic garglers: baffle-headed Matthew; Dew-drop
the doctor; Askr Dingwangle: rod bent hard over ice.
Nothing in the bowls but ghost or cauliflower:
nothing but dandelions lining your crop.
I should record that the book mentioned in "Give me back my moot-halls and hackbuts, my quadrants and compasses/ My Regiments of the North Star" was a 16th C manual of navigation.
Two poems are orthodox evocations of place, both in Scotland.
Frank Kuppner (1951-) made his debut in 1984 with A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty, a literary joke so wonderfully sustained as to surpass the status of a joke. This utterly brilliant and delightful work is a series of 511 quatrains written as captions for ancient Chinese paintings reproduced in a pre-war book by Osvald SirŠn (Swedish). What he was doing up till 1984, is a perplexing question. No doubt it took a long course of idleness, extravagation, and debauchery to finish this Goliardic, hilarious, debauched, academic mind, with its extraordinary ability to extrapolate and fantasize on an arbitrarily chosen theme. Wild flights of fantasy start from the conventional forms of humour such as making up joke captions to pictures or justifying philosophical paradoxes. Ability to take off into the empyrean can be a problem; his debut was impersonal poetry, unable to link directly to his own experience. With his second volume, the relationship between Kuppner and his characters was more in question:
For how long did the interiors of stars
Labour to produce their earliest complexities?
A quick glance into my eyes, and then away;
There were no quick glances during that long cooling.
The structure of the female cannot but be an object of wonder;
As might befit the daughters of the stars,
Expertly inheriting the family enchantment,
Losing the sheer size, but little of the brightness.
('The intelligent observation of naked women'.) He built on the formal success of 'A Bad Day' to write the strikingly successful personal and autobiographical poems, 'Through a Glasgow doorway', the title piece, and 'Five Quartets', which appear as three of the five poems in The intelligent observation of naked women (1987). Two of these are about love and the opposite sex, an unconventional topic in contemporary poetry. He seems uninterested in short poems and so in showy verbal effects; his idea of voice appears in the structural choices shaping long runs of poetry, rather than in instant phrases or lines. His fluency with words is a product of underemployment; untapped intelligence, social life that fills the days, verbal games to pass the weeks away, a fundamentally rebellious and unintegrated attitude, but so privatised as not to belong to any rebellion, only acknowledging the shared need to chase away boredom. The experience Kuppner is drawing on is the strangely shapeless one of stopping at home all the time, not being touched by the world around you. Something vital to Kuppner's procedures, apparently, is poring over the stock of second-hand bookshops, where you might find the stranded and estranged volumes such as the SirŠn book which was the basis for A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty, or the 1930s book of photographs which gave rise to 'A Guide-book to Prague'. The stress on objective language reminds me of D.M. Black (born 1941). The choice of English as a medium may in fact be related to this need for externalisation, and for keeping the poet's voice as neutral as possible; but the search for explanations may generate over-interpretation, since after all the choice of English hardly represents a material impediment to poetry. Kuppner was born in Glasgow ('ever since, nursing the impossible dream of living in Edinburgh'), although of Polish parents; his views on national identity might be of interest, but it is superfluous to suppose that an author needs such views. It would be interesting to caption a photograph 'One of our contributors losing his national identity'. At any rate, Kuppner's account of experience is impressive partly because there is a voice giving contextual information as well as the always limited lyric voice. His first Glasgow poem depicts several decades of life viewed through the lens of the buildings, all close together, where they took place. This tranquillity of long perspectives may in fact be the quality which Kuppner is looking for; the integration of the person and the scene provides the necessary stability and detachment. The mastery of time, which could only be achieved in long pieces, is the strength of these poems which use no cynical quick effects, are capacious, and always offer more twists, more recesses. It seems to be the attitude of many other poets that the quicker the poem is over, the better.
Don Patterson seems to have adapted his style from Kuppner's.
4th volume out in 1994. Everything is strange. Second Best scenes from Chinese History, 97.
Robert Crawford (1959-)
(A Scottish Assembly, 1989; Sharawaggi, with WN Herbert, 1990; Talkies, 1992; Masculinity, 1996)
Crawford is one of the Informationist poets (cf. the article on W.N. Herbert); David Kinloch and Peter McCarey have also written effective poems in this genre.
Like so many of the poets in the Bloodaxe anthology, Crawford writes in a para-logical way in order to upset existing structures of commonsense and authority. His journeys are impossible on the map as it is. We could ask how far this opening of the door of reason to the four winds goes, and discover that there is a limit nearby, since his cause is that of Scottish Nationalism, and the transvaluation of all values does not reach as far as subverting the idea of a government whose seat is in Edinburgh. He is to be commended for admitting the opposite possibility in a surreal poem set in a post-independence Scotland:
Accusing the D.C.Thomson group of continuing to hold the national mind intellectual hostage, the Scottish fleet has commenced its bombardment of Dundee.
Under the terms of the Treaty of Glenrothes, the islands of Rifkind and Little Forsyth are to revert to their former names.
('Hostilities', from Talkies) Crawford offers us denatured scenes as a challenge to the imagination: an independent Scotland is disconcerting because unfamiliar, he hopes by turning the prism on the existing political set-up to disconcert us and lure out its failures and inconsistencies.
The scope of each poem seems to be given in a rather measurable way by how spacious the unreal world is, which it allows itself, how far it goes before the dazzling shape reverses itself out and falls to the ground. Thus, the best poems in Talkies by some way are the long ones: one about a Scottish Intelligence Officer in (neutral) Athens during the Great War, which is based on the war memoirs of Compton MacKenzie, and 'Customs', about Sir James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough. One wonders how long this series about Scottish literary figures can continue; presumably he should move on from these brilliantly altered biographies, real features expertly remade, to the autonomy of pure fiction.
Sketches of Scottish literary figures are the staple of guide books and topology. His scenes could come from TV: the portable mythology of whisky and kilts, only altered. 'Insignia' gives three anecdotes from Scottish history, of the type which appear in Ladybird books: except that these anecdotes are unreal, their point is inauthenticity. The centre of political argument is shifted away from some heavy passage of Hegel to the vivid-banal scenes of the television screen: kitsch as the small change of political mythology and also of shared purpose. Accurately, Crawford sees kitsch as authentic and inclusive symbolic discourse in a mass society. 'Mary of Bernera' is an astute parody of a Gaelic song from Carmichael's Carmina Gadelica, sharpened to attack the sexual morality of the ultra-Puritan Free Church.
Several poems are dedicated to a rather banal domestic discourse. It's touching that the author loves his wife, but the merits of the denaturing method are such that one realises on reflection that it is personal relations which should be subject to the doubling and refracting lens. All the untransformed elements of the discourse fatally weaken its wingspan. Crawford has retained the features of a well-brought-up Oxonian Movement poet who poses no threat to the reader; of course, it is unlikely that he would be published by Chatto if this were not so.
The theme of Talkies is two semantic systems trying to occupy the same space, interfering with each other; although the title poem is about the advent of sound in the cinema, he is writing specifically about Scotland. The whole point about bilingualism in Scotland is about stratification and class conflict: this may be an unusable topic for poetry (fights breaking out in the audience, etc.), but Crawford is wrong to think that he can talk about the confluence of semantic systems as a pictorial effect, a kind of double-exposure photograph, while ignoring the human agents who produce the meanings. Yes, a modern city is full of pretty flashing lights, produced by LED, cathode ray tube, neon and fluorescent inert gas technologies. Presumably the Informationist idea is to break up the black-and-white Doom Theology of a kind of Old Testament Socialism, which makes the world indistinguishably monotonous outside the Golden City, and break up life into a very large number of behaviour patterns: this makes it possible to write a book of poems in which each successive page is interesting, and has the surface appeal of well-designed computer or video graphics. The significant boundary is that where information starts to become aesthetic: a problem which is taught in Design Schools. The poem is faced on either side with decay into mere reasoning or mere ornamentalism. The use of musicality to aid didactic intent does not go back only to Christopher Logue's political songs, or Bertolt Brecht's, but to the first hymn-writers, and for all I know even further.
The review of Talkies in Lallans remarked that he was more at home in English than in Scots; this is a matter of social class, not simply of phonetics. Talkies contains only two poems in Scots. Crawford is suave, eager to please, affable, not a rebellious nature; this is politically just as well, since primitivism and nationalism do not mix, but may in retrospect seem to have restricted his poetic flying time.
Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915-75) After doing the linguistic work to get through the surface of his poems to the artistic conception, one is bewildered to find so little. Under the Eildon-Tree (1948) is the first book of the Scots Revival other than MacDiarmid's which one can call excellent. Eildon-Tree as regression to sixteenth century modes, with an ideological covering taken from Graves. Error: this should not happencomapre to MacLean. discuss Eildon.
Smith, with his themes of world politics, Scottish social morality, love, and dissipation, his glittering style and braid Scots, looked like a major poet. Close examination reveals otherwise. The English-Scots divide has often been a divide between respectable and uproarious: Smith, although from an educated family, and an academic by trade, was exceptionally keen to associate himself with the latter. His belief in the charm of the unrespectable life is quite misguided; in poem after poem he describes drunkenness, low company, and joviality, as if they had some intrinsic fascination. Peter Trudgill identified, in analysing his research on the use of dialect in Norwich, negative prestige: speakers saw the use of socially lower forms as something desirable, a way of asserting virility, sturdiness, or solidarity; Goodsir Smith is relying on negative prestige in this sense. The effect of this palls very quickly, because the poetry lacks other levels of expression and development to keep our interest ablaze. Since he was not a native speaker of Scots, but acquired it in adult life, it may perhaps express a fantasy for him, a persona rather than a whole man. He comes on in the character of a larger-than-life roisterer such as Richard Harris or Richard Burton have been labelled by their publicists:
Ah, stay me wi flagons, dochter o'Sharon, comfort me,
Hain me, compass me about with aipples!
Cool this fevered spreit with seven-frondit docken,
Flagons, marjoram, green fields, Salome!
Belling beakers, let them be til my hand! Dance!
The corn be orient and immortal barley greit
Stay me, shore me up thir rue-I-ends, ye cedars o'Lebanon!
(Seceders o'Raasay, what say ye?)
Slocken my drooth with pippins, Hebe!
Rosemary, bed me, sort my place of biding, sain me,
Entreat me kindly, temper this tuneless carillon,
This cracked and untrue campanile, O Venezia, greenest isle!
Black Rose of Shalimar, white hands, come cherish me
And hap me haill, my soul, with hairtsome companie,
Licht unflichtering of this lichtless airt!
Fetch tumblers, dear buffoons, carnalitie
And Mammon's blythsome Bridal-Sang...
This is flavoursome, rollicking, yet it lacks movement, and it's too much of a cento, the ad lib blustering of a drunken actor, an exercise in pastiche following rules we all know already. This character goes back, not to Villon, but much further, to the Goliardic poems. The swollen torrent of words feels like largesse and relish for life. The periphrases are not truly creative, but lacking in force: Merrytricks is Latin meretrix, a whore (hence Mammon's bridal). A young girl, indeed, is being debauched. (No doubt she is wearing Shalimar perfume. I cannot follow the reference to the campanile in Saint Mark's Square, Venice. The seceders are fundamentalist Protestants, abstainers. Bell beakers, swelling outwards, were Bronze Age vessels, quite likely filled with beer.) He simultaneously attributes to the rough life qualities, of degradation, sexual exploitation and cynicism, and fundamental, unhealing despair, which destroy its appeal: he cannot persuade himself that Edinburgh Bohemia is carefree and brilliant in the way that Montmartre, at least in mythology, was. This coarseness of low life must rub off on Scots itself, which he seemed to be proud of. He believes that sex and alcohol (perhaps, too, being working-class) yield moments of higher truth, but just what is this truth? Short of turning into an Abstinence Tract, concerning repentance and redemption from the Pit of drunkenness, his work becomes an explanation of how his wastrel ways prevented him from eventually writing his Collected Poems. He died young after what one can only describe as a slow decline.
Other Scottish poets
Robert Garioch (ps.R.G. Sutherland) (1909-81) wrote exclusively in Scots (Edinburgh dialect) and was one of the more persevering and substantial of the poets who began using Lallans before the Second World War. His poems have a robust humour and closeness to everyday life, which acts as an upper limit on their scope. Reading them at length is discouraging; they cannot count as more than apprentice pieces, staggering first steps towards a poetic technique, because they are so closely based on the works of older Scots poets, mainly Fergusson, but also the anonymous author of 'Peblis to the Play'. This limitation denies the thesis that Lallans poets were developing autonomy and confidence; if Garioch writes in traditional manners, it is because he lacks fluency in Scots. Perhaps his finest achievement is a poem about his experiences in a POW camp, called 'The Wire', but this has a mediaevalising air, the psychic and linguistic barrier of 1603 refuses to be overcome, and the poet instead of developing an integrally modern style regresses back into the depths of time. Similar traits can be observed in the work of Tom Scott. When such pastiche is presented as more than sly humour, it immediately becomes sentimental. We can hardly stave off such criticisms as those of Edwin Muir, to the effect that when a poet whose thinking takes place in English writes poetry in Scots, the poetry is unaided by thought, and presents unaltered original features of childishness, pastiche, predictability, sentimentality, and mediaevalism.
Norman MacCaig (1910-96) MacCaig was a primary schoolteacher for almost forty years, and lectured at Stirling University for several years after he retired. His lack of advancement as a teacher was claimed, in his obituaries, to be the result of his imprisonment during the war: as a conscientious objector. I don't know if his emphasis was more religious, or more nationalist and against fighting to save the Empire. The pacifism which had been so fashionable in England around 1933 was purged in the south, but wasn't abandoned at all in places like Wales and Scotland, where quite a few of our poets either went to jail or served in non-combatant jobs; there were whole labour battalions full of artists. Although born in Edinburgh, he had a mother from the Highlands, and has always had a sympathy for Gaelic culture. The central fact of his poetic career is a great reversal: he began in the 1940s with two volumes in the Apocalyptic style fashionable at the time, but returned after a refit in the 1950s (Rings on a Tree, 1955) with poems in a much cooler and more controlled vein. Given his eminence at the time (accepted, with MacDiarmid and Goodsir Smith, as Scotland's major living poets), it's of interest to inquire whether this refit was a raid into new territory or a regression to convention. The sacrifice of the adventurous style may have become all too public and endowed with too many civic virtues. I have been trying to find a development in MacCaig's style in the past forty years, but to little avail. The treacherous demons native to Scottish climes have been hovering around him: in this case, the lure of sixteenth-century courtly poetry and perhaps of seventeenth-century Gaelic folksongs (Error: this should not happencheck statement in Penguin Modern Poets), in an idiom easy to assimilate to Scottish court poetry. (look for texts) This register has been made slightly more intellectual by the influence of Donne. It would be agreeable to record that he had indulged in this style in youth and then developed into something more personal and less restrictive with maturity. This poetry put great stress on grace of utterance and had little interest in psychology.
MacCaig is not a realist, because he is interested in the offset between two cognitive frames, for example memory and a present scene, or a man in a landscape and his mind observing itself; or the images two lovers have of each other. He writes about animals to relativize human perception as the product of a specific physical form and situation. The love poems are at the centre of his work; I feel that they are too discreet to give anything away, everything is formal like a dinner and too neatly carried off:
You read the old Irish poet and complain
I do not offer you impossible things -
Gloves of bee's fur, cap of the wren's wing,
Goblets so clear light falls on them like a stain.
I make you the harder offer of all I can,
The good and ill that make of me this man.
('Gifts', in The Sinai Sort, 1957). (Note the rhymes.) The resemblance to Graves is obvious; but MacCaig had not purged all Apocalyptic elements from his imagery, and occupies a niche between Graves and W.S. Graham. In one poem, MacCaig casts someone lost in thought as an 'explorer', as in Graham's 'Malcolm Mooney's Land', and a number of his poems are part of an inquiry into language. MacCaig's wondering about the paradoxes of speech and cognition, moving on from merely setting them up, is handicapped by an archaic, Platonist, theory of meaning. He limits the terms of inquiry in case he opens up an unmapped space which the poem leaks away into. When he remarks that the names by which we call fish mean nothing to the fish, it's interesting but scarcely a revelation of being. His labelling is too exact:
Half-built boat in a hay field (title)
A cradle, at a distance, of a kind:
Or, making midget its neat pastoral scene,
A carcass rotted and its bones picked clean.
Rye-grass was silk and sea, whose rippling was
Too suave to rock it.
(credit volume) This 'estrangement' is like Roy Fisher, and reminds us that poets trying to find their way out of the standard 1950s poem found the same routes; Graham and Tomlinson were other disquiet rebels. MacCaig seizes on visual confusion as the basis for a poem: the energy animating the poem then depends on how much indeterminacy and disorder the poet allows to this confusion. MacCaig's reliance on paradox presumably derives from Empson and from the Metaphysical poets who inspired Empson: but the Paradox points forward to the nonsequitur and jump-cut which became typical in the Sixties. In the late Sixties, he began using vers libre and unrhymed lines.
MacCaig's evocation of the limits of language is often brought into service to justify the indescribable quality of love; as, strangely, the dizziness of Forties poetry had been a way of evoking excited states of mind. His failure to write involving love poems places a limit on the whole enterprise. Certain writers in the 1950s were trying to probe into shared semantics: which immediately means the loss of control by the individual speaker over the verbal situation. MacCaig could not face this, because he had already made control the main poetic virtue. This enabled him to publish six separate volumes of poetry in the 1960s.
Douglas Young (1913-73) had real poetic power, as revealed in his best poems, but as he clearly stated, he was primarily a scholar (of Greek) and poetry played second fiddle throughout his life. His Collected Poems (? only a selected poems) are disappointing, because so many of them are opportunistic and occasional, the real Collected Poems are as if an unwritten book. But one should look closely at a poem like 'Ice flumes owrgie their lades', a thing of genuine power where the deepening of style is not merely phonetic, or pastiche, but genuinely structural and expressive. Young was a keen Nationalist who refused to be conscripted in the Second World War on political, anti-British, grounds; a principled stand, aimed to gain publicity for the cause and question the power of Westminster, which his forensic skills allowed him more or less to get away with. (He did go to jail at one point.) Later, however, he abandoned the SNP and became a prominent member of the Scottish Labour Party. It is revealing that both Lallans and Nationalism had to be so peripheral to the life of this very intelligent and committed man. The obvious question which the historian has to ask is whether there was a Lallans Revival outside MacDiarmid; or, following that, whether the Revival was essentially a failure, like the project of a Communist Scotland, something which cast off sparks but saw them all sputter out. Although MacDiarmid launched the Synthetic Scots movement in 1921, it seems to have taken until 1940 for anyone to follow him in writing Scots which was like his, rather than being archaic, refined, and simplistic. Indeed, few writers actually used Synthetic Scots: I can list Goodsir Smith, Douglas Young, Alexander Scott, Alastair Mackie, James Alexander McCash, a single book by William Jeffrey. Even Garioch is writing in a locally specific dialect, without attempts at linguistic reform.
Alastair Mackie (1925-95), who was raised in Aberdeen but taught in east Fife for most of his career, records that he began writing in Scots in 1954, after reading MacDiarmid, and went over to English in 1988. This was the second time he had given up Scots, the first being from 1960 to 1967 (he records in Akros), so that his first volume was in English. He was thus revived by the optimism of the Sixties, especially by space travel, the theme of his sequence of poems 'Captus cupidine coeli' (in a magazine in 1971, then in Ingaitherins, 1987). He was, over roughly a forty-year period, the only significant poet to emerge in Scots: a burden of responsibility which has probably contributed to his pessimistic and elliptical style. The style, which has prevented him from becoming popular, represents a systematic attempt to get away from imitating any pre-modern Scots poets and to modernize diction. There is no experimentalism or flamboyance in his style, in fact he resists these as much as he resists heartwarming expressions of patriotic optimism, expressing instead a mood of lucid depression. I am inclined to say that when someone does think in Scots, it's so unexpected that the audience don't take it in. He published Soundings(1966), Clytach (1972), Back Green Odyssey (1980?), and Ingaitherins(1987), a selected poems.themes: ideals, infantile and undeveloped (Adam and Eve theme, image of angels, Hollywood films, memories of Rimbaud and baudelaire, the Odyssey). sharp disillusion. illusion are not so sharp, in fact are backward and unexamined. scorn for easy sentimental myths. Romanticism in bracketed form; typical for Scottish poets in the 1950s. Odyssey theme probably comes from Baudelaire's Voyages. popular art. the Odyssey and voyages; demolition of the world of the imagination in favour of a reality which is not loved or internalised. stray optimism of Captus cupidine coeli; not just an Aberdonian pessimist. lack of dialectic movement to his scepticism, too much of traditional structure of sentence and line. unreconciled opposites (e.g. wife versus poetry). lack of belief in the imagination and in the transformatory powers of language.reaping the rewards of demolishing theatrical myths; the fire sale.also the myths of the self; his own poetry exposed rather than projected.traces of anti-humanism, pro machines.a number of ideas held in suspense.
Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-)
Finlay's contribution to poetry as such is slight, but attention should be drawn to it nonetheless: The Dancers Inherit the Party is an engaging volume, wholly unpredictable, exploring new ideas and cutting short the instant they cease to be interesting. His career as a maker of objects and graphics falls outside our strict limits, but despite that represents a possible way out, of both paper and public invisibility, for poetry.
Finlay first crosses our field of vision in 1945, in the memoirs of Derek Stanford, in whose company of conscripted, but non-military, labourers he served. At that time he was more interested in painting than writing poetry; Stanford records him having organized a student revolt at his art school — something ahead of its time in 1944. Fascinatingly, Stanford reports Finlay's enthusiasm at that time for Un rappel a l'ordre, by Jean Cocteau, a book promoting the neo-classicism which was such a feature of the French scene in the 1920s, and after; it was variously associated with homosexuality, stage design, Picasso, the resistance to Picasso, Surrealist painting, etc. Finlay later produced a postcard pack called Rapel. Finlay's vision, as developed in the 1960s, is specific, if ramified: a Classical garden whose ornaments recall the stern Republican virtue of the early years of the French Revolution, of Robespierre and Saint-Just; themselves massively influenced, in their oratory and legislation, by the idealized virtues of Republican Rome, codified by the Senatorial opposition to the 2nd century BC rise of dictatorship, a form of monarchy and arbitrary rule; a political theory taken fully fledged from an even older tradition, that of Greek civic virtues, brought to a rhetorical peak in the cult of Tyrannicides, men of exemplary virtue who assassinated, even at the cost of their own lives, the destroyer of republican freedoms. The most martial, traditionalist, ascetic, and indeed communistic of the Greek republics was Sparta. This was thought of as rustic and archaic, as well as being Doric, which is why we associate the tribal name Doric with those qualities: rusticity is also central to Finlay's project. We can see that his discourse is one of considerable complexity, even though it uses graphic and very familiar symbols, such as the Doric column.
Various scandals have attended his career; a strike organized at art school; one with his attack, in the late Fifties, on the repressive attitude of aged and distinguished Scottish poets who controlled literary patronage in Scotland; one with the local tax authorities, who assessed his Little Sparta garden at a generous rate, and then presented him with a thumping and annual rates bill; they refused to classify it as an art gallery, which attracts rates exemption. Later there was a feud with the Scottish Arts Council, leading him to the slogan 'the Arts Council must be destroyed', I'm not sure what the casus belli was; his allies are called the Saint-Just Vigilantes, after a notoriously pristine, inflexible and purely idealistic orator of the French Revolution. Then there was the scandal about his contribution to the centennial of the French Revolution; an employee of his demanded top billing, the inclusion of his own work in the show, maximum publicity for himself, etc., and when this was not forthcoming, he denounced Finlay as a pro-Nazi because various weapons and machines of World War II featured in his interpretation of recent history, as well they might. Amazingly, the French authorities were frightened by this puerile piece of gangsterism, and Finlay was removed from the celebrations. (Details of this are in relevant issues of Art Monthly, and in PN Review no. 62, for 1988).
In the 1960s (1961-7), he edited Poor.Old.Tired. Horse., a magazine of Concrete poetry, which in his hands had a certain daft wit and charm; the genre appears to have produced memorable work in Scotland, and Germany, but not in England, where it fell victim to egomania and Messianism. Görtschacher, in his wonderful book, gives an account, based on letters from Finlay, of some of Finlay's designs, for the cover of a poetry magazine: "The area on the cover [of Littack 2] is set out like a page in a herbal book. On the lexical level, there are, with the exception of the magazine's name (...) only two words. The 'Gourd' is in fact an aircraft carrier [cucurbita meaning 'vessel' and also 'gourd']. The left-hand shape is the aircraft carrier, which is based on the WW2 Japanese carrier Shinano, seen from above. The curly growths are the curious configurations of the oceans, which become growths of the 'gourd'. The sectional illustrations show the interior of the 'gourd', and the aircraft are depicted as seeds. (...) The cover for Littack 3 consists of three black tanks with green camouflage, with which the magazine is equated. The immediate idea is that beauty or order is something which rests upon a willingness to fight for their survival. The word 'Arcadia', printed in green, relates to [Poussin,] Arcadia has always been associated with the idea of death. (...) For Littack 4 Finlay adapted the idea of 'Kill Rings', (the title of the cover), that tanks carry a record of their kills in the forms of rings painted on the guns, by treating each issue as a 'kill'. (...) The cover 'Tribals', i.e. the plural of 'Tribal Class Destroyers', for Littack 5 acknowledges the visual pun on the relationship between the way that certain native tribes ornament themselves, and certain warships 'camouflage themselves'. (...) On the V2 rockets, which the Germans used to bombard London with, are messages (...) for Lord Goodman, Chairman of the Arts Council at the time, and Ronald Mavor, the former Scottish Arts Council Director. The idiom Finlay availed himself of refers back to the WW2 habit of chalking personal messages to the recipients on the bombs. (...) 'Ya bass', a Scottish version of the French 'ŕ bas', is the best known of the Scottish gang warfare slogans and could be encountered on walls in Glasgow." (WG p.628). We may recall that the origins of Concrete work were in industrial design, which is what Max Bill was really interested in; it was to do with putting information on tin cans and packages in the most effective and economical way; logograms were invented, in Vienna, for a very similar purpose, and the aircraft markings which interest Finlay so much are an excellent example of this theory put to practical use. Advertisements, and magazine layouts, certainly resemble the best examples of Concretism, because the people who design them went on the kind of course which Bill designed. Finlay differs totally from most Concrete poets in having something to say: not a gobbledegook know-nothing antinomian, he wants a rational and perfectly formed message to reach us, and realizes that mixing visual and verbal means, and drastically simplifying wherever possible, is the most effective way of doing this. Finlay has chosen the end of the eighteenth century as his special period, but still his is basically an Enlightenment project: he does conceptual art because he is capable of conceptual thought. His designs, indeed, use the methods of propaganda: because this is a language developed by the best brains in Europe, over thousands of years, for maximum efficiency in getting information across to large numbers of people; repossessing this wealth is a first step to repossessing other kinds of wealth.
(sources: Yves Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay, A visual primer; Stephen Bann, exhibition catalogue; special issue of Chapman, circa Oct 1994.)