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Christopher Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) and his wife Valda in the Scottish Borders in 1968 |
Notes on an enduring love
Celtic nationalists Hugh MacDiarmid and Valda Trevlyn’s Bloomsbury meetings blossomed into a long marriage, much of it lived apart. Fiona Green reviews a collection of their letters
Scarcely Ever Out of My Thoughts:
The Letters of Valda Trevlyn Grieve to Christopher M Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid
). By Beth Junor. Word Power Books £20
THE meeting of Hugh MacDiarmid, Scottish nationalist, and Valda Trevlyn, Cornish nationalist, was a meeting of destiny.
They did much of their courting in The Plough pub in Museum Street opposite the British Museum. Then, over a period of nearly 50 years, while enduring extreme poverty and isolation in order to nurture and protect her husband’s genius, Valda kept account of their life in her regular letters to her absent husband.
If you read these letters edited by Beth Junor alongside the Carcanet edition of the New Selected Letters of MacDiarmid (2001) you can track the correspondence as it occurred, with the poet travelling to give readings or meet publishers, and Valda going back and forth from their home in the Shetlands to care for her ailing mother and aunts in Cornwall.
There would have been none of these fine letters describing in intimate detail the exigencies of her life with a poet and no money had they not been separated, or been compulsive writers. And we would not have access to them but for the enterprising poet, Beth Junor.
Hugh MacDiarmid was one of the great western intellectuals of the 20th century, instrumental in creating a Scottish version of modernism and, unusual for a modernist, also a Communist and committed Scottish Nationalist.
He wrote both in English and Lallans (a literary Scots). MacDiarmid was the pseudonym adopted by Christopher Grieve in 1922 because he wanted an alter ego who could deliver attacks on the hypocrisy of popular respectability in Scotland.
It also helped best describe the “antisyzygy” or duality which he found in the Scottish soul.
Valda was a bright, practical woman and the letters illuminate her character. She is warm and patient, willing to forego many of the basic necessities of life for MacDiarmid’s work
While at times hostile, angry and ambitious, what mostly shows is her loyalty and affectionate humour. “She had a rare talent to absorb and balance his extremes”, says Beth Junor. “Her vulnerability which she was at pains to hide from the public, shines out here in the letters to her husband: Valda was the sustenance for Chris’s creativity.”
The letters were written mainly between 1933 and the late 1950s, a time when they were mostly apart. They describe a period when there was no NHS, no social security system and life on an island was very hard.
The islanders were amazingly supportive, as were some friends and family, but it was Valda that kept them all alive. She saw Chris through poverty, illness and mental breakdown and she reveals a talent for writing which contradicts her low self-belief.
Mao Tse Tung of China and Hugh MacDiarmid of Scotland do not seem names of instant association, but in the 1950s the poet was on a Communist party delegation to visit China and meet the Chairman.
My mother-in-law, Nan Green, was working there at the time on a magazine called China Reconstructs and there she met MacDiarmid. It was this link that made her son, Martin Green, interested in publishing him and so A Lap of Honour came out in 1967. Then A Clyack Sheaf was published in 1969, which was when I met Christopher and Valda.
I found Christopher a deeply sad man but, when roused, this sadness would transform into a keen wit. I found Valda forthright, assertive and bossy – a force to reckon with. She was very concerned about his drinking and I remember as a young woman in my twenties being shocked at these two oldies arguing about his wish for a third whisky.
I can now see that a friend’s recommendation to them they both live on Whalsay, a dry island in the Shetlands, was a clever one. It would protect MacDiarmid’s health and aid his writing.
We enjoyed some good discussions in The Plough in Museum Street, where some 30 years previously Christopher had courted Valda and which in the 1960s and 1970s was the meeting place of authors and poets like PJ Kavanagh and Francis Stuart.
My last meeting with MacDiarmid was in Edinburgh. On a rare outing on his own, a different MacDiarmid emerged: witty, sharp, abrasive and by the end of the night, he and the artist John Bellany were singing traditional songs to see the evening out. It was rare, because in his later years, he and Valda were seldom separated, which is why the letters diminish in the 1960s.
Beth Junor’s book is an unusual and fascinating addition to the literature on MacDiarmid and a rare insight into the world he inhabited. It is also a testimony to an extraordinary woman.
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