Ugly Muds, Haw Once in a very long way, of
course, there's a mighty detonation like Dr. Leavis's Richmond Lecture, but literary controversy is on the whole a tame business in the south these days; and metropolitan publishers tend to regard them- selves as above the battle whenever one occurs. Not so in Scotland. A handout from the Wild Hawthorn Press of Edinburgh accompanying two books of verse (one of them by Mr. Ian Hamilton Finlay, whose Glasgow-accented Zen has already been noticed in this column) says: 'We began with a feeling of warmth and open-ness. We are now going to return hate for bate, because, Hugh MacDiarmid, you called Mayakovsky and Attila Jozsef and Fyodor Tyutchev and Lorine Nie- decker—and many more creators of beauty-- "fools.". . Meanwhile there arrives from Allan Donaldson, also of Edinburgh, a pamphlet by Hugh MacDiarmid entitled The Ugly Birds With- out Winev. Here Dr. MacDiarmid defends him- self vigorously and copiously (with references to Alexander Blok, Ion Luca Caragiale, Dr. David Craig, Dr. George Davie, Mr. Moray McLaren, and others) against the charge that he exercises 'a virtual monopoly in the field of Scottish literature' and sails slam-barn into Mr. Ian Hamil- ton Finlay and others for a bunch of 'whining jeun'es refuses.' Dr. MacDiarmid thinks, in short, that Mr. Finlay's Glasgow Beasts, an a- Third, Haw an Inseks an, Aw, a Fush is 'old hat.' Well, much of the fine detail of this polemical pam- phlet is on the difficult side for the onlooker, but it is good to know that the perfervid enthusiasm of the Scot has nowise been weakened by Anglicising influences. Nor the old Caledonian enterprise either, for another hand- out from another Edinburgh publisher ends with the statement that he hopes to publish in 1963 or 1964—`though this will be news to most of the authors concerned'—poetry, short stories, and novels by various people. 'Any of these writers,' he adds, 'may well be fixed up with other publishers: in which case I apologise to them.' He needn't. Authors like this sort of com- petition, if none other.
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