Unusually for an X, he was also a Y
While re-reading The Right Attitude to Rain, I came across several quotations I thought about memorializing in my Facebook profile, including this one:
How many people in the United States believed that they had been abducted by aliens? It was a depressingly large number. And the aliens always gave them back! Perhaps they were abducting the wrong sort.
This is so emblematic of what I love about Alexander McCall Smith. He’s full of these funny little observations that are expressed in the compact, deadpan way that British people have of saying things. Perhaps they were abducting the wrong sort. It’s lovely.
In the end I decided that pickled onions were probably enough Alexander McCall Smith for one Facebook profile, but I did want to add a lovely little poem about Scotland that’s quoted closely following the above gem. When I searched for the poem, though, one of the results that came up was from an SNP (Scottish National Party) news release, about SNP MSPs wearing the white rose of Scotland to the opening of Parliament. I was concerned that maybe the poem has nationalist associations that I wasn’t aware of, but I couldn’t find anything else that suggested that it’s more than a longstanding image association made famous by nationalist poet.
To make sure I was spelling the poet’s (pen) name correctly, I looked him up in Wikipedia, and found this gem:
He was instrumental in creating a truly Scottish version of modernism and was a leading light in the Scottish Renaissance of the 20th century. Unusually for a first generation modernist, he was a communist. Unusually for a communist, he was a committed Scottish nationalist.
The parallel there sent me into gales of laughter, closely followed by coughing. There can’t have been that many Scottish communists, anyhow, I would think.
I also found this bit amusing:
MacDiarmid listed Anglophobia amongst his hobbies in his Who’s Who entry.
Not that Anglophobia is funny, per se, but having Anglophobia as a hobby in your Who’s Who entry strikes me as strangely hilarious.
For what it’s worth, I’m neither a Scottish nationalist nor an Anglophobe, but I do think it’s a beautiful little verse, expressive of the love I feel for Scotland.
The rose of all the world is not for me.
I want for my part
Only the little white rose of Scotland
That smells sharp and sweet — and breaks the heart.
There can’t have been that many Scottish communists, anyhow, I would think.
For a while there were quite a few. Toward the end of World War I, and in the years immediately after, the shipyard workers of Glasgow–numerous, skilled, and indispensable to the wartime economy–began to display a lot of militancy; there was a Shop Stewards’ Movement, bypassing the existing unions, that came close to functioning as a Workers’ Soviet, particularly during the big strikes that broke out. All this (as elsewhere in Europe, and even the US, at the time) was connected with widespread admiration for the Bolshevik Revolution, and even more widespread resistance to being sent to make war against it (as 15 nations, more or less energetically, did up to about 1921.) Many European Communist Parties drew a lot of their early members from among workers who had been radicalized in these struggles. Probably the best known Scottish figure was Willie Gallacher, a Clydeside shipyard worker who became a leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain and was an MP for many years, often the only Communist in the House of Commons; his base was, for a long time, one of those working-class Communist strongholds, like the “Red Belt” of Paris suburbs, the working-class districts of Barcelona and Torino, and–for a while–some neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, that stubbornly voted for local Red candidates and read the Communist press.
MacDiarmuid was an oddity, too Red for the Scots Nats and too nationalist for the CP; it’s interesting (and, by now, needs recalling) that Communism was attractive enough, in much of the world, that remarkable artists and thinkers (Picasso, J.D. Bernal, the Indonesian novelist Pramoedya, François Jacob etc. etc.) gave it their allegiance almost as a matter of course; needless o say many of them were vivid characters like MacDiarmuid. (The Irish playwright Sean O’Casey was a similar figure.) The falling-of-scales-from-the-eyes went on gradually and unevenly over the decades and was in some senses coextensive with the intellectual history of the 20th century.
Comment by rootlesscosmo — June 15, 2008 @ 12:59 pm
MacDiarmuid was an oddity, too Red for the Scots Nats and too nationalist for the CP
I guess this is why the parallel is expressed the way it is!
Thanks for the info!
Comment by Alexis — June 26, 2008 @ 2:05 am