Be the depth that awaits the hour

 

‘Hamish’s phrase “Poetry becomes People” captures the essence of his beliefs and his life’s work. Hamish not only created poetry but nurtured poetry, in Scotland and abroad: in doing that he set in train a cultural force that has transformed Scotland and engendered new political realities . . . ’ These words were spoken in the first of the eulogies in honour of Hamish Henderson at his funeral in St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, Edinburgh, on 15 March 2002. That funeral marked ‘the end of an auld sang’ but as fifteen hundred people rose to sing Hamish’s international anthem ‘The Freedom – Come a’ Ye’, and see his coffin borne out into the afternoon sun, feelings of completion were accompanied by a strange sense of expectation. This was a man who was much more than a poet and a singer: Hamish nurtured human lives and set in train many of the cultural and political forces that have transformed modern Scotland. He was ‘a lad o’ pairts’ but perhaps above all a teacher –   a man of Franciscan simplicity, Socratic wisdom and Druidic authority: 

Under the earth I go                             

On the oak-leaf I stand                        

I ride on the filly that never was foaled                          

And I carry the dead in my hand                                  

 

There’s method in my magic. 

 

I first met Hamish at five to midnight on Monday 2 May 1967. We had both travelled to North Cornwall to document the Mayday ’Obby ’Oss festival in the fishing village of Padstow. I was a final year student making a film. He was a distinguished folklorist doing anthropological research. Having packed my camera and equipment away, I went down to the small bar of the Ship Hotel for a drink. As I ordered, I noticed a man seated alone at a table. He gestured that I should sit with him. We talked for two hours, and long before one of the great days of my life drew to a close I knew I had met a man of genius. Next morning I was up early, to get out on the road, but Hamish was there before me – eating his breakfast – with ‘my’ place reserved opposite him. Over the following thirty-five years Hamish and I were to collaborate on many projects, films, books, cultural and political campaigns, and we remained close friends until the day of his death.

 

At the time, Hamish was forty-eight, a tall, slightly dishevelled, shambling man who emanated energy and clarity of vision. He was married, had two young daughters and was employed as a folklorist at the University of Edinburgh, but he had already lived many ‘lives’ – as a soldier, Intelligence Officer and Partisan commander; he was a republican socialist, a Scottish nationalist, one of the founders of the European Peace Movement, a leading figure in the campaign for nuclear disarmament, a seminal figure in the Scottish literary renaissance, a multilingual polymath and veteran anti-apartheid campaigner. He had something of the Pied Piper about him, something of the Ancient Mariner, but his look was forward – towards a future lighted with possibilities. His self-evident love of Scotland and life’s pleasures were ‘ideas’ that Everyman could share.

 

Hamish had much more than charisma: he left an indelible ‘impress’ upon almost everyone who met him. In Sicily, when Hamish was twenty-three, Major-General Tam Wimberley described him as ‘already a legend within the 51st Highland Division’. In 1949, the English poet David Gascoyne commended Hamish’s Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica in similarly exulted terms: ‘it occurs to me that you may not care for the epithet “aristocratic” as applied to the spirit of your poetry; but of course I don’t mean anything ruling class by the word, only the sense in which the Carpenter’s Son was aristocratic.’ Later with down-to-earth humour the Irish folk singer Dominic Behan described Hamish as ‘A certain Giant of Celtic Culture’, whilst the American musicologist Bud Bronson, writing to thank Hamish for years of ‘invaluable advice’, could scarcely contain his enthusiasm:

 

My cup runneth over – and it was your divining-rod, Hamish, that beyond all others in these latter days, found the springs of native song and brought them again to the surface for the refreshment of our generation and generations to come . . . You touched the rock and living waters gushed forth. Posterity’s debt to you is incalculable and will not be forgotten . . .

 

In 1979 Amleto Micozzi informed BBC Scotland that ‘in Rome, Hamish has a salvivic power’. In 1988 John Berger described him as ‘perhaps the last of the great communist thinkers: Hamish, Gramsci, Marx – I see these three as champions of a crucial and continuing strand in modern European thought’. Certainly Hamish rarely shied from controversy and, when his ‘contradictory character’ was decried, he proudly took the insults offered – as compliments. He delighted in conviviality but retreated from ‘society’; he was a man of commanding natural authority but refused every trapping of power; a humanist Christian who despised Christianity’s institutional brutalities; a communist purist with Rabelaisian appetites; a Scots patriot who tore into ‘Scotchness’ with withering savagery; a revolutionary Jacobin who embraced Jacobite tradition; a ‘scientific rationalist’ who personified the heroic values of old Highland society; a decorated British Army officer, who worked to break England’s Unionist hegemony; an outstanding orator who wandered Scotland like a tinker, addressing the poor ‘whom age put aside’. Despite his huge gifts as an art-poet, he spent the best years of his life encouraging others to be ‘makars’ and his nation to ‘sing again’. He had enemies but few would deny his talents – or the ‘drama’ that followed him wherever he went. Thus, the question arises: why has the general public heard so little of this man? Why did Hamish not write an autobiography? Why did he discourage the various biographers who made offers?

 

Hamish knew he had a life-story worth the telling. He started a personal archive at the age of eight! By the time he retired from the School of Scottish Studies in 1987 this had become a treasure-house of ‘everything concerning people’, and included a huge correspondence with a worldwide network of friends and colleagues on a vast range of subjects. He also knew that a great deal of ‘disinformation’ about his life and work had been circulated and that a ‘biographical account’ was the obvious means of setting the crooked road straight. During the 1980s he did write a series of semi-autobiographical essays for the Scottish literary magazine Cencrastus, and in the nineties collaborated with Alec Finlay on the publication of two books, Alias MacAlias (a selection of essays) and The Armstrong Nose (a collection of letters). But, with regard to his life as a whole, Hamish consciously and deliberately remained silent. The reasons for this silence were both personal and ideological – and they made the writing of this biography a doubly challenging responsibility.

 

Hamish lived life on a Byronic scale: like Shelley, he believed that ‘the poet’ can shape the world; that national poets have ‘prophetic powers’. One of the Gaelic words for ‘poet’ is filidh (from the verb ‘to see’), and, as a child brought up in the Perthshire Highlands, Hamish always understood poets and ‘seers’ to be one and the same – artists who could foresee and direct the future, singers who kept secrets and promoted tribal wellbeing. As a teenager, Hamish thrilled to the creativity surging within him and, entirely naturally, embraced his ‘bardic responsibilities’ not as onerous labour but as the very stuff of his life. He knew that much of the world’s greatest poetry had run in harness with the making of nations, and he was determined to dedicate his life to the service of the Scottish people.

 

Hamish recognised culture as a Darwinian force in society, and ‘folk wisdom’ as the bedrock of even the greatest individual achievements. He also knew that all truly original ideas take longer than a single lifetime to find acceptance and become integrated human and political realities.

 

Thus he embraced the idea of the folk-continuum and looked for heroes who embodied modern, proletarian values. One such hero was Antonio Gramsci (the Sardinian communist philosopher, who had died in 1936, after ten years incarceration in Italian prisons) and, between 1949 and 1951, Hamish dedicated himself to translating The Prison Letters of Antonio Gramsci. His sense of identification with his subject was palpable: ‘It is necessary with bold spirit and good conscience to save civilisation. We must halt the dissolution that corrodes and corrupts the roots of human society, the bare and barren tree can be made green again. Are we not ready?’ In 1950, while still immersed in his Gramsci studies, Hamish outlined the framework within which he would advance the Scottish Folk Revival, as the catalyst national renewal in Scotland:

 

with fruitful adventures

and listen: the sap rises – sweet springs of song

like hymns of belief to the buds that will blossom.

 

The hard way is the only way               

The worst enemy is acedia                  

The greatest mental weakness the failure to tackle it at the root:             

Stick to your guns:                   

If you win your children will justify you.            

If you don’t it’s just too bad.

 

‘Wholeness’ was crucial to Hamish: wholeness in life, wholeness in art, wholeness in his ‘divided Scotland’, and he believed that it was ‘poetry’ alone that could encompass this whole. In 1952 the publisher John Lehmann asked Hamish to explain a new sequence of poems he was planning and Hamish sent back a long statement that begins with a quotation from the German poet Heine:

 

‘Freedom, which has hitherto only become man here or there, must pass into the mass itself, into the lower strata of society, and become people.’ It seemed to me when I first read those words, that what Heine said of Freedom also applies to Poetry. Poetry becomes everyone and should be everyone. But in fact – at any rate in the Western World – it only becomes individuals here and there. Our most important task is still to make poetry ‘become people’ . . .

 

Hamish was constitutionally unable to separate his art, life and politics, and he knew that if he was to achieve what he was determined to achieve, he must ‘go underground’ – like Wallace and Joan of Arc, like Burns and Blake – and work with and through the common people. He had long foreseen that the historical ‘apostasy of the Scottish elite’ made new forms of cultural and political activism absolute necessities. Thus he made poetry his chief tool of change: he would invert received opinion, exult ‘the humble lowly’, espouse and disseminate new values, much as the Chinese sage Lao-tse had done two thousands years earlier:

 

            Hundred lesser streams?

 

Like Yeats, Hamish had no fear of ‘the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart’. He knew that personal honesty, beyond shame or the law, was a prerequisite not just for good poetry but for effective participation in any kind of revolutionary politics – because personal dishonesty preconditions both artists and political leaders to compromise and failure. Such honesty is meat and drink to a biographer.

 

Hamish had a sublime self-confidence. For him the possibilities of political and cultural defeat did not exist, at least while Scotland stands and mankind survives. As Hugh MacDiarmid recognised, Hamish was a force of nature, a man who somehow ‘embodied’ the Scots nation. He championed ‘the lived moment’, which he defined as ‘thrusting a rock in the craw / of devouring time’; he glorified in the oral tradition but also ruthlessly set down his inner thoughts, feelings and ambitions in private jottings, poems, songs, letters, aphorisms, anecdotes, essays, lecture notes. The Henderson archive is an enormous, un-catalogued collection of fascinating, largely unpublished material. Quotations from this magnificent compost heap of an archive feature prominently in this book and give it what I hope is an autobiographical vividness. As an artist, Hamish knew the power of the surprising. Lifelong he took pleasure in his ability to shock the complacent but, more importantly, with Druidic cunning he delighted in revealing more by always concealing something. Like any good teacher, Hamish Henderson liked to leave a student, an audience, an opponent, a drinking partner, a biographer, the reader, with something to do, with ideas to develop; the future to make.