In Touch With Edwin Morgan

James McGonigal and John Coyle, co-editors of In Touch With Language, a newly published collection of Edwin Morgan’s prose 1950–2005 (ASLS, 2020), reflect on the process of putting the book together, and their own experience of Morgan as a teacher.

JMcG
Edwin Morgan’s prose? If I think back, it was his prose I heard before his poetry. This was in October 1966 when he lectured us on Modern Scottish Poetry at Glasgow University. His lecturing style was clear and organised, in quite a light staccato voice. I’ve occasionally heard other speakers with the same accent and rhythm to their speech, so it must be a Glaswegian style, maybe among older speakers. He became excited when talking about Hugh MacDiarmid‘s poetry, and much less enthusiastic, more dutiful, about Edwin Muir‘s. And it was only later I came across essays or reviews where he was expressing the same views, in a more sophisticated way, but still clear and organised of course, because that was his style. He was teaching from a set text, Maurice Lindsay‘s anthology Modern Scottish Poetry, which had just come out that same year from Faber. I noticed that he didn’t refer to his own poetry at all, which of course made me look out for it elsewhere too. So for me it was the prose, or his absence of a prose account of what he was doing in verse, that led me on to the poetry.

JC
The poetry voice first for me. ‘The Death of Marilyn Monroe’, ‘Los Angeles!’ Blew my socks off! His voice always reminded me a bit of that of Ian McAskill the weatherman (though he didn’t turn up on telly until 1978). Another South Side boy, according to Wikipedia.

JMcG
Then the following year he lectured on Seventeenth Century Verse and Prose, which was as heavy as it sounds. He clearly was interested in the way that prose could organise an argument. But I still recall his quick swerve sideways in one lecture, into Polish political poetry and the role of writers in Eastern Europe under Communism, linking that to propaganda and the religious wars in 17th-century Britain. Later when I came across his lecture notes in Special Collections in Glasgow University Library, I saw that he deliberately left blank spaces to signal that he could improvise at that point in the lectures, which were otherwise full of detailed information. Nothing more as an undergraduate for me, because I took courses in Yeats and in Literary Criticism (I don’t think ‘theory’ was a term used then) and not Scottish Literature, which was his special paper. But he was really memorable in talks to the Literary Society, which both students and lecturers attended. I remember his slides of concrete poetry from Germany and Brazil, and also Norman McCaig (who was the other guest speaker) being snide about them. What about you?

JC
So for me it was 1974 and I remember him giving a reading of his own poetry to the first year class in the immense Joseph Black Chemistry theatre. That I think was my only exposure to him until he was assigned as my senior honours tutor. I’ve just unearthed a letter from him arranging an appointment and enclosing a sheaf of bibliographies, all setting out a list of primary and secondary texts – all individual works and collections and no such thing as an anthology. He gave five lectures on modern poetry, from Hardy to the present, at once managing the long view and the zooming in on particular poems. He also gave two lectures on the topic ‘From Romanticism to Modernism’, the first of which managed, while not underplaying ‘the unsurpassable achievement of the Victorian Novel’, to move on very quickly, through an insistence on science and a crisis in language as instrumental in breaking down the conventions and expectations of realism. So on we went to James v Wells, Woolf v Bennett (‘plodding’) through Galsworthy, Lawrence and Joyce of course. Then, by way of an insistence on the necessary departures from verisimilitude, to Ionesco, Beckett, Burroughs. So The Naked Lunch got a run out, and then a discriminating run through 5 different works by Beckett. For Modern poetry, as the criticism and indeed the work show, it was a similar story. 

I was a somewhat abashed tutee, then. I was at the time more at home with the French than the English department and he seemed somehow keener to know what I saw in Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Proust than to hear my gushing about Four Quartets. I remember one hour when I started going on about Barthes and the ludic and he seemed particularly keen. Always generous, measured, a listener, a coaxer but never a booster or boaster

And then there was the honours hour given over to a debate about the future of poetry, between EM and Philip Hobsbaum. Philip had Peter Redgrove to champion, EM the international avant-garde. That was my first ever experience of team teaching, although it was more like tag team teaching.

JMcG
That’s an interesting change of approach to using his own poetry, John, possibly because it was already well known in English classrooms in secondary schools, in the West of Scotland certainly. But I recognise those detailed bibliographies. And he had read all the books on them! I was on the receiving end of those when I took a Masters part-time with him in the early 1970s, on Modern British Literature and Literary Theory Post-1945. That’s a mouthful even to say, let alone to digest the course content. And I was working either in school or looking after our children, and falling asleep over the novels on the bibliography. He had not only read them but also often had reviewed them. That life as a reviewer and cultural commentator was a part of his prose output which ran alongside his poetry, and which we had to grapple with in our book to make a helpful selection.

All of these postgraduate studies were really just background for me on the poet that I really wanted to study, Basil Bunting, the Northumbrian modernist. And I continued doctoral work on Bunting through the 1970s, again part-time and at a distance from Glasgow, sending Edwin Morgan work by post and meeting up to discuss it in the holidays. He was a helpful tutor for me, very thorough and flexible, friendly but focussed on the work. I suppose you could say that he had time for both of us because of the convincing, or at least potentially convincing, nature of our own essays! Coherence in argument was important to him, along with sincerity, I think, and perhaps a pinch of style, but not at the expense of the first of those.

It helped if you could manage the syntax to carry that mix. I mentioned his lectures on Seventeenth-Century Verse and Prose, but have just realised that another 1960s set text was his edited anthology, the Collins Albatross Book of Poems, featuring English and American poetry ‘from the fourteenth century to the present day’. The present day was 1963, or just before, with Allen Ginsburg’s ‘American Change’ being the last poem in the book. That was still used as a set text in 1966, and useful because Scottish poetry was better represented there than in other anthologies. But it was interesting to re-read his original Introduction when we were editing In Touch With Language and to see that in one of the public lectures from much later, ‘Long Poems – But How Long?’ (1995), he rehearses some of the same arguments about how to define what a ‘long poem’ is. We can maybe come back to that, because it was important for his own poetry. But when you were a student in 1974, he had just published his first prose collection, Essays (Carcanet Press, 1974), and I wondered if anything was made of that in the courses or in the University bookshop?

JC
Yes, I agree on what was important to him in terms of coherence and the syntax: that was not unique to him, but essay discussions with him were so often a matter of verbal tact, when a phrase would be picked up on when a mark was overstepped. I bought the Essays from John Smiths bookshop in the John MacIntyre building and read it through, learning a voice I suppose. Of course the cheap part of me kept going back to ‘A Hantle of Howlers’, but even there I was struck by its magnanimity, sense of fun and appreciation of the inventiveness which can occur when the scholar’s foreign tongue is honestly mistranslated. This was a long way from the de haut en bas sneering which was, and remained, the common currency of the Common Room. I remember my first staff examiners’ meeting when Newell and Yearling, showing all the tolerance of their bonkers cultic formations, joined in a chorus of how today’s students knew ‘nothing at all’ about Shakespeare, which they were jointly responsible for teaching. I wondered aloud whether we might need to send the students on a course. I got a couple of looks, and a ‘Quite!’ from Philip Hobsbaum.

JMcG
Including ‘Howlers’ in his first book of Essays does show how different he was, and how different he wanted to be, from the norm of academic literary critic in the 1960s and 1970s. He was happy to be random, to follow enthusiasms, to explore the wider culture picture, or to change the frame of that picture. He was not interested in becoming the recognised expert on one period or author. And when we came to edit In Touch With Language, that variety had to be reflected too. Do you have a favourite piece?

JC
When I was going through the papers and saw a piece entitled ‘Kelpies, Nasturtiums, Polyhedrons, Mammuks and Liripoops’, I said to myself that no matter what the rest was like, it was going in. The words all come from the work of Hugh Mac Diarmid and all have something to do with Scotland, tying in with the theme of a series of public lectures given by the National Museum. Morgan employs what he calls an anti-method method to set up what becomes an associative yet disciplined fantasia running from St Columba to the present day, generously calling in other younger poets like Liz Lochhead and Mary Montgomery. So not just does it manage to live up to that title, it somehow achieves an almost symphonic effect. I’ll quote the conclusion, if I may: ‘You can read books, but don’t forget that books are only the poor end-product, the human end-product, of huge energies of imagination that pound through history like animals, roaring through James Hutton & Hugh Miller & James Clerk Maxwell to produce the enquiring part of the spirit of Scotland. If these energies are dormant, they can be reactivated, & that is what I have tried to do, in this lecture.’

JMcG
I have several favourites, one being his Times review of Brecht’s The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui at the Citizens Theatre in October 1967, because I saw it and thought it was a powerful theatrical experience. His review is naturally more mature and aware, but he admired it too. And I like the New Statesman piece ‘Signs and Wonders’ about the changes taking place in Glasgow in 1965. They were happening all around me, but because I had arrived in Southside Glasgow as a ten-year-old from a country town, and then moved out shortly to Kirkintilloch in my teenage years, all of this urban development remained quite distanced and strange. So it’s great to have it brought to life by someone who was close to what was going on, and enthusiastic about it. It tells you a lot not just about Glasgow but about Morgan the observer of his own urban landscape, from which so many of his poems came. I also like his review of The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse in 1964, because he is dealing with a kind of poetry that is not urban or narrative, and is at such a distance from his own preferred style, but he treats the anthology in a thorough, lively and engaging way, and even points out some modern experimental Japanese poets unfairly omitted. I’m conscious that all of these come from the 1960s, probably for sentimental reasons. But there are some great reviews from the 80s and 90s, on Roy Fisher and Tom Leonard for instance. He not only admired their poetry, but got on well with them personally. There’s a warmth that balances the more analytical lectures we chose to include, which are impressive in a very different way.