On February 23rd 1933, Hugh MacDiarmid wrote to his publisher to assure him that his waspish lyric, 'An Apprentice Angel' had been dedicated "to L.M.W" to highlight the difference between the craven religiosity of the clergyman depicted in the poem and the genuine spirituality of the Rev Lauchlan Maclean Watt, a well-known Glasgow divine. He omitted to mention that he had himself drawn Watt's attention to the dedication some weeks earlier, when he claimed that the poem had at last put the Reverend "in his place" and shown him up as a "conceited vain skunk". MacDiarmid's impossibilism (his own phrase) was in evidence again 14 years later when he complained to the editor of the Carlisle Journal that he had been unfairly dismissed from his position as a reporter on that paper.
Admitting he had been drunk on the job, he indignantly denied that he would ever allow intoxication interfere with the discharge of his duties. Writing to the Shetland Times in 1941 in response to an article which had described him as arrogant, he conceded the charge but went on to observe that "it is customary humbug to pretend that arrogance, intolerance, and conceit do not consort with . . . greatness".
Though good fun, and worth having, these vituperative effusions are somehow too predictable, too much in accord with what one has come to expect from MacDiarmid. They bear witness to the flying sparks rather than the glowing core of his character (to borrow the terminology of his 'Third Hymn to Lenin') and shed little light on the processes behind a poetry which again and again touched "greatness" in the years from 1922 to 1933. Easily the most interesting of the 529 previously unpublished items which make up New Selected Letters are the dozens of family letters which could not go into the public domain while the poet's widow, Valda Trevlyn, was alive. This intimate - not to say coruscating and incendiary - domestic correspondence makes it possible for the first time to hazard an answer to the key critical question, "What happened MacDiarmid?"
MacDiarmid provides perhaps the 20th century's most startling example of a poet who ceased to be a genius. Did he (like Rimbaud) turn his back on, or rather (like Wordsworth) tragically decline from, the innovative brilliance of his early maturity? With a skirl of defiance he insisted over the last four decades of his long life that the huge "scientific" poems in chopped-up prose to which he committed himself from the mid-1930s were a necessary response to 20th-century cultural conditions, and that he could no longer sanction the "irresponsible lyricism" of A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle and the incomparably musical short Scots poems of Sangschaw (1925) and Scots Unbound (1932).
Yet the later poems were not only unmusical and in English, they were also, at times at least, bathetic and stylistically inept. MacDiarmid's admirers have long suspected that the sensibility which produced the Scots poems underwent major damage in the 1930s but the nature of that damage has been a matter of speculation until now.
New Selected Letters reveals that the poet's first wife, Peggy, tormented him by promising but always at the last minute denying him access to his beloved children, Christine and Walter. The suffering he endured, as he wrote to Peggy in March 1937, "has not only cost me dear - but Scotland dear, for it destroyed the pith of my poetry and the very core and kernel of all my work".
Even more disturbingly, a series of painful letters to his second wife, Valda, and his brother, Andrew, indicates that MacDiarmid was diagnosed with tertiary syphilis in 1935, in the wake of his breakdown in the Shetland Islands. The poetry's characteristic fascination with corpuscular processes and bodily emissions suddenly achieves a grotesque biographical context, and the rhythmic limpness of the later work takes on a grim significance in relation to muted but unmistakable epistolary intimations that the poet was impotent from the middle 1930s.
New Selected Letters is not ultimately a distressing volume, however. The depth of the poet's love for Valda and their son, Michael, comes across with epiphanic force, and his reconciliation in late middle-age with Christine and Walter - both of whom are still alive - makes for a touching story. Readers in this country will be interested in the large cast of Irish friends glimpsed or addressed in the letters - everyone from Yeats, Austin Clarke and Frank O'Connor to John Montague, Seamus Heaney and an extremely young Colm T≤ib∅n.
Patrick Crotty has recently been appointed Professor of Irish and Scottish Literary History at the Academy of Irish Cultural Heritages, Magee College, University of Ulster