The Two Cousins Episode 5

 

Iain Smith

 

We left Hector MacIver (in Episode 3) socialising with literary figures in Edinburgh.

 

By the late 1930s MacIver had obtained a teaching job at the prestigious Royal High School. But he had also now become even more set in the activity for which he became most famous (or notorious):

“How the walls of the Abbotsford or the Café Royal or Milne’s Bar echoed to the talk at this time, on the state of Scotland, as Chris (Hugh MacDiarmid) and Sidney [Goodsir Smith] and I set the Celtic world to rights. Clouds of blue smoke, gallons of beer and whisky, witty talk -heart to heart-, narrowness and prejudice flew out of the Abbot door.”

 

Hector had activities other than teaching and arguing. In a hostelry on Rose Street, Hector one night showed another side of his cultural talents. The musicologist Ronald Stevenson subsequently wrote:

“Within a few minutes of our meeting, we had got on to Scottish music and soon he was singing – I remember his pleasant baritone –songs from his native Isle of Lewis. And very unusual songs they were no ‘sangs o’ the cratur’ but strangely serene psalm songs sung in the Gaelic, with no less than ten, and sometimes more than a dozen, notes to each syllable. Such long-linked melismas I had never heard in any other vocal music.”

 

(This may well be a slight over-exaggeration: melismas –extended notes revolving around a single syllable of language- are found in Gregorian chant.)

 

Author and poet Louis MacNeice already knew Hector. A piece about MacNeice tells us in an aside something of Hector’s literary activity (most of which is now lost):

“MacIver had published on the iniquities of landlordism, the failures of the herring industry, subsidy and the dole, and the collapse of Lord Leverhulme’s attempt to set up manufacturing industry on Lewis.”

 

 

Hector’s friendship led to MacNeice visiting Lewis and staying with Hector’s family in Shawbost. This proved a somewhat traumatic event for all concerned:

“Louis had stayed with my family and me at An Gearraidh Buidhe and was supposed to be travelling with his wife. Actually he was not married!.... More than twenty years after, my family still became virulent when discussing the ‘immorality’ of his visit.”

 

Another writer explains

“Then, in 1937, (MacNeice) undertook a visit (apparently Longmans advanced £75) to the Hebrides. He was accompanied by his current crush, Nancy Sharp (she had recently left her husband, William Coldstream) who illustrated the subsequent book.”

 

A later writer (admittedly of the, allegedly liberal, 1960s) puts it more bluntly:-

“My English teacher, Hector MacIver, was his friend, the dedicatee of I Crossed the Minch which in 1938 launched the ribaldries of the poem “Bagpipe Music” while recording, though rather discreetly, how MacNeice ran off with the wife of the painter William Coldstream : surely deserving a Nobel Prize for libertinism.”

One description of the book says

 

“Following loosely in the footsteps of Johnson and Boswell, MacNeice describes with distinctive candour the people, customs and landscapes of the Hebrides. Alienated from the way of life he encountered in the islands yet utterly fascinated by it, Louis MacNeice provides a unique insight into a now vanished culture and, as such, the book is a fascinating social historical document of Scottish rural life in the late 1930s.”

The book included two poems that are generally acclaimed. The first quatrain of Leaving Barra reads:-

The dazzle on the sea, my darling,
Leads from the western channel
A carpet of brilliance taking
My leave for ever of the island.

 

And then there is the rightly and much renowned “Bagpipe Music”:-

It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet;
Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.
The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.

 

One has to search a little to find what effect Hector MacIver had on “I Crossed the Minch” other than being a genial host. But one critic picks out where in “I Crossed the Minch” there is clear evidence of MacNeice and MacIver collaborating in analysis of the difference between a dance in Shawbost, part of the “Celtic timelessness”, and a concert in the town of Stornoway - where the dancers were “becoming objectified, alienated products of the music industry.”

Or, as MacNeice himself put it in “I Crossed the Minch”   “… one could thank God that one was not a citizen of Stornoway….European man at his worst.” The point that MacIver and MacNeice seemed to be making was that the culture of entertainment in Shawbost was an indigenous local product; the culture of Stornoway they saw as an importation.

One 21^st century Hebridean critic has written to me:

“MacNeice's view of Stornoway. What did he expect? For centuries the town has been the antithesis of rural Lewis: anti-Gaelic, weak in religious faith, hedonistic, eager to adopt imported behavioural trends (e.g. cinema-going, flapper attire in the late 20s, complex female hairstyles). Cailleachs [old ladies]from distant townships like Gravir or Brenish would actually stop to stare at the latest outlandish fashions among the gilded urban youth.”

 

How much Hector appreciated MacNeice’s book is apparently (and sadly) unrecorded. This would have been interesting to know, not least because of what is said by one reviewer (in 2007) on the book’s re - publication:

 

“MacNeice moans about the Island people, the drab landscape, ‘the monotony of heather’, the food…... He gropes his way over the Islands with his eyes and ears closed. The only conversations he records are with people of standing; the editor of the Stornoway Gazette, which was produced in English, schoolteachers or his middle class friends………. The locals he mentions only in passing as a means of providing him hospitality which he appears to accept as his right. The Gaelic language he holds up as a barrier to local conversation”

 

 

 

Between one thing and another, one can understand why the book was as poorly received in Stornoway as it was in the MacIver home in Shawbost.