Alexander Scott

On 6th June 1944 (D-Day) Scott’s regiment landed on Juno Beach in Normandy. It was not until 9th June that they experienced their first serious engagement with enemy aircraft fire, artillery shelling, snipers, Spandau fire and tanks. Unsurprisingly, the death count was high. Writing to Alan Bold in 1979, Scott recalled that ‘Of all the 15 subalterns in our battalion who landed in Normandy on D-Day, I was the only one still there in Germany on VE-Day 11 months later’. In August 1944 Scott was seriously wounded in the thigh when a grenade exploded near him at the Battle of Falaise Gap. He returned to duty later that year and in February 1945, he led his squadron through the Reichswald (Imperial Forest). This was a decisive operation (‘Operation Veritable’), to clear and cross the forest near the Dutch-German border. In terms of the fire-power of the artillery barrage, it was a bigger battle than even that of El Alamein. Throughout the battle, Scott looked after his men and exposed himself to danger first. For his actions, he was awarded the Military Cross (M.C.) but in later life was taciturn about his role in the War and very ‘touchy’ about his medal. While Scott wrote comparatively few poems directly about his wartime service, his most famous poem ‘Coronach’ was written as an elegy for all the men of his regiment who died. The poem was written out of a sense of survivor’s guilt. It looks at how, as a poet, Scott had to return from the war to his books and pen, and be haunted by the voices of the dead men who demand to use the poet as their voice:

Waement the deid
I never did,
But nou I am safe awa
I hear their wae
Greetan greetan dark and daw,
Their death the-streen my darg the-day.

(‘Lament the dead / I never did / But now I’m safely away / I hear their woe / Crying, crying night and day / their death yesterday my work today.’)

Scott was released from the army in November 1945 because he was considered important for post-War reconstruction. He resumed his degree and finished it in 1947, graduating with first-class Honours. Like his colleague and fellow poet-academic Edwin Morgan, Scott was awarded a place for post-graduate study at the University of Oxford. Financial necessity meant that Scott had to turn down this offer and instead, he found employment as an assistant lecturer in the English department at the University of Edinburgh. In 1948 he left Edinburgh for the University of Glasgow where he took up a post as lecturer in the Scottish History and Literature department. He would later confess to some regret about this move, actuated by the mistaken belief that, as an assistant lecturer at Edinburgh, he might not be allowed to teach Scottish literature. David Robb, Scott’s biographer (see Auld Campaigner: A Life of Alexander Scott, 2007) claims that Scott was always ambivalent about his move to Glasgow. This feeling continued until his death. He was never offered a chair (professorship) in Scottish literature despite being integral to its establishment as a department, and in 1983 he retired early as a Reader (a post he had been promoted to in 1976). Robb argues that Scott disliked university decision-making and politics and while he was an effective teacher and lecturer (Robb writes that he could be paternalistic as a supervisor) he ultimately felt undervalued and lonely at the university, where the demands of teaching often left him little time or inclination to write creatively.

Scott regarded his role as a teacher as an extension of his overall mission to further interest in the poetry of the Scottish Literary Renaissance. He had been inspired from a young age by Hugh MacDiarmid’s literary movement, and while he admired the older poet, he did not, unlike some of his contemporaries, venerate or follow him unquestioningly. There are two distinct phases to Scott’s career as a poet: the first was from the publication of his first collection The Latest in Elegies in 1949, to the publication of his second, Mouth Music in 1954. At this time he was also working seriously on his plays, which were garnering some awards and being performed at the Citizen’s Theatre in Glasgow. He was an active member of the Renaissance and felt relevant and valued. Because of the war his poetry had lost some of its more lyrical qualities and had taken on a more hard-bitten edge. From 1946 to1950 he worked as a broadcaster and radio actor for BBC Radio Scotland. However, the advent of television and significant changes in taste in the theatre left Scott’s plays looking like something from the increasingly antiquated music-hall and student revue past. This, twinned with the stress of his work at the university and of his editorial work on various magazines such as The Saltire Review of Arts, Letters and Life (1954-1961), led to a period of creative silence from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. When this period of silence was finally broken, Scott wrote triumphantly:

Plucking songs from the air,
seventeen poems in seven days,
and all beauties,
I think of a six-year silence,
six winter trees
with never a single bird
– and meantime
I net the eighteenth lark.

(‘Eighteen’)

In 1964 Scott was promoted to ‘senior lecturer’ and found that he was writing poetry again. His work in this second phase in his career was more playful, witty and sardonic than before, and was heavily influenced by the changing world around him. In 1968 he published Cantrips (‘Magic Tricks’), his third collection, marked by many poems engaging with contemporary events and even popular culture and music, such as an elegy for Marilyn Monroe. At this time in the 1960s that was a pronounced reaction against the older Scottish Literary Renaissance figures like MacDiarmid and an opening up of Scottish poetry to America and Europe. Scott found that he could, in effect, write well from the position of a ‘double agent’ – someone who was simultaneously interested in, and critical of, what the younger generation was doing. As such these poems are some of Scott’s most fascinating (and controversial) where the speaker wants to both distance himself and participate at the same time. The poems are not simply a jaundiced and censorious look at the young by the old but a complex search for core intellectual and aesthetic values for the older poet at a time of fast change. Perhaps his most famous poem from this period is the epigrammatic ‘Scotched’ sequence, excerpted below:

Scotch God
Kent His
Faither.

Scotch Fraternity
Our mob uses
The same razor.

Scotch Optimism
Through a gless,
Darkly.

Scotch Pessimism
Nae
Gless.

Scott continued writing until the mid-1980s, when his emphysema, diagnosed in 1977 (he had smoked heavily all of his adult life) began to worsen, leaving him a house-bound semi-invalid. He is a Scottish poet who took the appellation ‘makar’ extremely seriously and all of his poetry, from both periods, is marked above all by its craftsmanship. Norman MacCaig praised the ‘individuality, accessibility, wit and passion’ in Scott’s work, which achieved both a surface toughness and an underlying tenderness or fragility. Edwin Morgan said that Scott’s passion led him to see things in terms of ‘black and white’, and we should be aware of these contrasting shades in his work. Even when his poems are at their most glib, we are reminded in other poems, like ‘Words for the Warld’, of how the world grabbed Scott by the ‘scruff o my life, / Shuke me intil a shennachie’ (‘shook me until it made a poet of me’). Some of Scott’s later poems became increasingly concerned with the race for space. His intimation in these is that people were getting ahead of themselves and forgetting things too easily, too keen to escape their responsibilities to the earth and its residents. ‘Von Braun’ is a poem that sums up this vision, and shows how close the experience of the War was to remain to Scott’s poetry. Written about the eponymous Nazi scientist who developed V-2 rockets and who later worked on the Apollo missions in America, the speaker claims:

You built the Apollos
from London bones.

[…]

Killing creator,
breath to a dead world.

Whose bones will we bury
to grace it green?

Article written by Richie McCaffery, 2016