Joseph
Macleod
Work
continues on Macleod. James
Fountain’s work is coming out as a book from Waterloo. I
read much
of his archive, in Edinburgh, in the very cold first week of January
2001. I
realised recently that there are some other poems which aren’t in
the Macleod archive in the NLS. While looking in New
Verse
for something else I was disturbed to find in
issue 3 a
1934 Macleod poem, 'Earthscape', which was not in the archive. It is
one of his best. I think he tended to type single copies of poems and
send them to magazines, so that if they were published the magazine
kept the typescript and Macleod retained nothing. Slightly alarming
if you want to be a Macleod expert! For the moment, it seems that the
body
of texts
we have is incomplete.
This
is the
poem:
Earthscape
they
are excavating under the briars of paestum
a
parian fragment of an old Goddess:
tackle
is hoisting
the
earthy torso up.
the
season is nearly over
and
russet roseleaves in recognition
deserting
hips and sere bedeguars
sacrifice
themselves
in
libation Upon her.
she
is Cold as they prise her up:
they
are forcing her out of season:
for
spring is her time, whoever she,
spring
is her time to return
not
this,
unrecognised
by spade or diggers
another
to join many
a
goddess evading collection,
her
Return from death to antiquity
the
fall of a crabapple is pointing
like
a single bell.
on
sard hard edge of a distant mountain
a
drab clad man
is
he sitting? standing?
too
minute for a thick finger to indicate.
walls
of a harem in a narrow street
are
peeling open:
corner
of a house on the opposite side disclosing
half
a group of women, looking:
as
thirsty enclosed cattle look
on
boats that row up and down a river:
with
large round eyes
on
orientals thronging the streets
merchandising
without wine
obedient
to books their authors have forgotten.
the
stripes on the feminine clothes
Swing
to the distant rock:
but
the Scale is incommensurate.
miniature
parables
to
the sun does he compose?
among
the stars hymenopterous mysteries?
and
humbly lay his forehead on the rock?
heraldic
Light is quartering the escutcheon,
how
Dare we call this sunlight pitiless?
tenderly
it warms the chilled widowed,
only
in daylight the tortured wife has peace,
gently
it revives dim philosophers,
compensates
exhausted gunners
moleminers
and batclerks
and
trousered savages knowing only
that
something has changed in the world,
who
cluster to carry in annual procession
a
mutilated image of a virgin.
through
men's provinciality
she
Returned from her virginity
to
fulfil herself in vain.
her
open eyes are not fixed on her child any more
nor
question heaven any more
but
Rise to the receding mountain.
is
he a Demiurge?
a
steward of the heavenly bodies?
their
banker, telling each how its account stands
and
where at any hour it ought to be?
away
from him an eagle and a fulmar
are
swinging: they will cross
over
the valley
hillside
woods where jays fight
finches
flash in honeycomb leaflight
badgers
freshen warrens
bees
lie crazily with careful orchids
and
lonely oxlips.
over
vetched fields they will cross
and
jackdaws playing with rooks and performing plovers,
watermeads
in which
blue
herons fish and rushes flower,
just
visible roofs of a country town:
too
High for little eyes to se:
Uncaricatured,
for
they are getting rare now
and
were beautiful.
he
does not see them.
to
know everything he has made himself Astigmatic:
two
men on two rocks
disregarding
two landscapes
slightly
superimposed.
where
his height meets level ground
is
a quiet Group.
twisted
aluminium and torn matter
an
aeroplane stands with its tail erect
and
crushed nose
driven
deep in earth.
from
the silence, from the suspense
is
made the recognition of Death.
the
workers from the jam factory
shocked
and astonished, Watch:
navvies
have come to Watch
with
hops and wheat in their bellies:
respectful
reporters chase away
bran-fed
inquisitive pullets, and Watch:
vegetable
sheep and potato pigs
come
up to watch:
and
the sleepless sun pours down.
the
bulk of the corpse-to-be
balances
the bulk of the old earthgoddess.
Many
goddesses, Many women,
little
richness in barren Apices:
but
brown Earth is an honest Plinth
that
underlies
and
is replenished by the sun.
I,
as I painted this
becoming
conscious of foliage
on
my breast and back and shoulders,
paint
in the bottom corner
as
symbol and signature
the
Hands that have touched me.
(This
is on-line with the whole of that issue of
New
Verse at a site called modernists.com. I am not making any claim to
copyright of the poem. As it is missing from
the
Selected Poems, it seems likely to evade notice altogether, which is
why I am including
it here.)
The
poem makes an equation between this statue emerging from the earth
and a flier crashing to his death and plunging into the earth. Like
is exchanged for like in a kind of balance. It goes on to describe
the state of the observer - who finally sprouts leaves
in a transformation, the usual punishment for a mortal who observes a
goddess too closely. The
perspective bent by squinting strain mirrors the precipitous path of
the aeroplane, downwards.
The Virgin, carried around in procession, is a middle term between
the buried statue and the pilot. the "hands that have touched me" may refer to a type of icon known as "akheiropoieton", not made by (human) hand. As
I pointed out, what may be the most successful poems are scattered in
magazines and don't show up if you go through all the folders in the
archive. Describing the work entire is not tractable as he was simply
too prolific - between the visible and the invisible. I can't wholly
approve of the move into documentary. The reasons are excellent but I
wish he'd gone on with the modernist style.
I
located an essay by Macleod in Little
Reviews
Anthology
for 1949. Bearing
in mind that ‘Adam Drinan’ was a pseudonym for Macleod, check out
what he says about Drinan: “Writing in English, George Bruce and
Adam Drinan from the East
Coast and the West respectively, rediscover the traditions of their
people in a style
that is simple, accurate, vivid and deep. George
Bruce's
output at the moment is small, but he is always alive and compelling
[…] Drinan is more graceful. He explored such relics of Celtic
forms and rhythms as have survived the onslaught of the Presbyterian
Church. But he is also a Marxist, and his awareness of to-day never
allows him any indulgence in
Celtic Twilights. He
has a faculty for translating into poetry the light, colour, people
and living conditions of the islands and the West Coast; and it is
significant that his poems, as I have been told, have been read to
and approved by Kintyre fishermen.
Also
significant is the rumour that his forthcoming volume of poems is
about the London blitz.”
The
blitz poems must be “The Macphails of London”, a typescript of
which is in the National Library. The anthology reprints material
from little magazines, in this case from ‘Anvil’, a miscellany
edited by Jack Lindsay,
which suggests a link to the Communist Party. This would explain
the name Anvil, linking poetry with virtuous metal-workers. The
essay is titled “Poet and People”, and despite the links with
communism and Scottish nationalism it avoids dogma, even if it
doesn’t really answer any questions about the nature of poetry.
Macleod had close relations with both the BBC (he worked for them for
eight years) and the Party, and while those relationships with
authoritarian and centralized organizations were likely to crush
creativity, this is not certain and he did produce some good work in
that period. He
wrote a whole book about his disillusion with the BBC and its loyalty
tests, but I have yet to see an equivalent document about the
Communist Party. Quite possibly Lindsay and the group around him
weren't a pain to work with, and the BBC were more oppressive with
loyalty tests, political dossiers, personnel people vetting dossiers,
etc. James Fountain has detected Macleod’s name on the list of
“crypto communists” which George Orwell produced in 1948. There
was a BBC purge of left-sympathising employees in the later forties,
although Macleod had resigned in 1945 and I don’t think he was part
of a purge at all. The purge is part of oral memory but I haven’t
seen anything about it in print. Released MI5 files don’t describe
internal BBC procedures and probably only capture a fraction of the
process.