Poetic justice from the grave; James Robertson says George Campbell

Nationalist and left-winger, despiser of the establishment, a writer who, steeped in Gaelic and Scots traditions, made no concessions to Anglicised tastes, George Campbell Hay fits the stereotype of a poet of the Scottish Literary Renaissance so well that it seems at first glance odd that he should be virtually unknown, even among relatively informed readers. Part of the problem has been that his work has been largely out of print for many years, although selections appear in the anthology Nua-bhrdachd Ghidhlig (1976) and Ronald Black's magisterial 1999 gathering of 20th century Gaelic verse, An Tuil.

More pertinently perhaps, Hay's career did not take the path of struggling young poet who eventually attains grand old man of letters status. For he was persistently dogged with depression and mental illness, which from time to time, including the entire 1950s, made him a resident of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital.

When Hay died in 1984, alone and bedevilled by drink problems, it seemed a sad exit for one who in the 1940s had been praised equally with Sorley MacLean, and even described as the best Gaelic poet since the 18th century Jacobite Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair. A year after his death, only the attention of antiquarian bookseller Donald McCormick saved Hay's notebooks and papers: he bought them at an auction for #3, the price of the old suitcase which contained them. These papers are now in the National Library of Scotland, and form the basis of a new edition of the collected poems and songs edited by Michel Byrne.

Hay's father was John MacDougall Hay, best remembered for his 1914 novel Gillespie, a dark but brilliant portrait of his native fishing community of Tarbert, Loch Fyne. George was born the following year in Elderslie, where his father was minister, but the elder Hay died of TB when George was four, and the family moved back to Tarbert. As a boy, George seems to have spent more time in boats and on the hills than among books.

His childhood was split between Tarbert and Edinburgh, where he was a scholarship boy at John Watson's and "that piece of Forever England, Fettes College": the latter sharpened his loyalties to Kintyre, Scotland and Socialism.

What this schooling, plus a degree at Oxford, did provide was a thorough classical education, the grounding for Hay's astonishing linguistic aptitude.

He had already picked up Gaelic from his aunts and others in Tarbert, and by the time he left Oxford his repertoire included Irish, Danish, Greek, Latin, Modern Greek, Old Icelandic, French, Welsh and Spanish. As well as Gaelic, Scots and English, he wrote poems in French, Italian and Norwegian. A fervent nationalist who expressed the view that the English were only getting what they deserved during the Blitz, Hay took to the Argyll hills in 1940 to avoid conscription.

He was arrested and briefly imprisoned, joined the Royal Army Ordnance Corps and was sent to North Africa. "Africa is admirable," he wrote in 1943 to fellow nationalist, anti-conscriptionist and poet Douglas Young, who had just served eight months in Saughton jail. "They show qualities here which would greatly benefit Western Europe, but Western Europe having all the machine guns doesn't worry about unmaterial qualities. She peers thru the sights and sees nothing beyond phosphates, cork, cheap labour and whatnot."

Africa unleashed a flood of verse in him, including Bisearta, a powerful response to the fate of the Tunisian town Bizerta caught in Allied-German crossfire for six months, with its timelessly resonant question, "C a-nochd a phigheas/seann chs bhaisteach na fala cumant?" ("Who tonight is playing/the old accustomed tax of common blood?'). From his empathy with the Arabs also emerged Mochtr is Dghall, a 1200-line unfinished epic which was not published until 1982.

The war took Hay to Italy and Greece, where his outspoken left- wing views involved him in the civil war there. A violent incident in which he appears to have come close to death brought on a nervous breakdown, and he was invalided home. He never held a full-time job again, and drifted between Tarbert and Edinburgh, a country boy ill at ease in the city, honing his poetic craft between bouts of illness, alternating between political and personal optimism and severe depression.

He received support from friends and his mother - whose only daughter Sheena, George's sister, suffered even more severe mental illness than he - but the impression remains of a lonely, misplaced man whose tremendous knowledge and love of literature and Scotland were not big enough substitutes for emotional and economic security.

Yet his poems often show much humour and sociability. An early satirical sequence, The Scottish Scene, makes fun of ministers, lairds, Celtic twilighters and Highland fakery. Having noted the presence at a Highland gathering of "the Duke of Brill in Hunting Cameron plus fours", the "leddies from the USA" and "Al the Olive Pugilist", Hay comments:

"Our fathers' ways are with us yet, our ancient backbone is unbent, the only Highlandmen I met I found in the Refreshments Tent."

And where he is matchless is as a poet of fishing and the sea, as in the pounding Scots ballad The Three Brothers or the tri-lingual praise-poem of a boat, Seeker, Reaper. But the sea is a brooding beast, and though the fishermen's heroic struggle with it inspired Hay, perhaps its inhumanity also overwhelmed him. In the allegorical poem Alba he writes:

"Here we must bide, work here to win her home, though the decks welter and swim, and the grinding galestorms white on the crests, trailing their cold foam, for nothing is here but the sea when her seams fail."

Hay's intense interest in poetic form and structure made him a very unmodern writer, and this unfashionable stance, plus the fact that he wrote mostly in Gaelic, limited his audience. But formalism is once again all the rage, and Gaelic no longer so sneered at, so he may have the last laugh from beyond the grave.

Since the price of this publication, the second project undertaken by the Lorimer Trust (who published the New Testament in Scots in 1983), will restrict sales to libraries and dedicated enthusiasts, welcome news is that a paperback edition, without the notes, is planned for autumn 2001. The present two-volume edition is the fruit of 12 years' scholarship by editor Michel Byrne, a patient reconstruction of Hay's life and work. One does not have to agree with Byrne's startling conclusions that Hay's life attitude was one of "single-minded optimism", and that his poetry, "wrought through episodes of great darkness", is "a poetry of hope and of sanity", to be grateful that it has been made so fully available.

Collected Poems and Songs By George Campbell Hay (Dersa Mac Iain Dhersa), edited by Michel Byrne, Edinburgh University Press/Lorimer Memorial Trust, #95.00

Copyright 2000
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.