Lessons from Life: Working on Edwin Morgan's Biography

The Glasgow launch of Beyond the Last Dragon: A Life of Edwin Morgan took place in the Mitchell Library, one of the great civic institutions of the city that he loved. He had many connections with the library, not least the collection of 13,000 of his books archived there, all read and many annotated, as an example of 'a poet's working library'. This had been the original idea of Hamish Whyte, his Scottish publisher and bibliographer, who was at the time a Senior Librarian there.
    The launch of the biography took place in mid-October 2010, almost exactly two months after the poet's death, and in the same room where his ninetieth birthday had been celebrated six months earlier by the launch of a new collection, Dreams and Other Nightmares: New and Uncollected Poems 1954-2009, and also a book of tributes, Edwin Morgan @ 90. This had been a happy occasion with the poet, although confined to a wheelchair, still looking younger than his years and happy to meet friends and colleagues from across different generations. The publication date of Beyond the Last Dragon had been arranged a year earlier, but now falling so soon after his death, I was worried that the occasion of its launch might be a gloomy one. But the interest, unpredictability and vitality that is typical of Morgan's poetry also seemed to exert a positive influence on the book of his life, and comments and memories from the audience and speakers evoked the strength of a personality that 'in combination with his deep poetic intelligence' had done much to shape Scottish culture in the second half of the twentieth century.
    One question from the audience that I did not find easy to answer was posed by the poet Brian Whittingham: 'In writing the biography, you clearly learned a lot about Edwin Morgan - but what did you learn about yourself?'. I struggled a bit, but said that I probably had learned to be more accepting of a wider range of people and attitudes, having read a huge ammount of the poet's correspondence. His ability to create and maintain relationships across the social differences of age, intellectual background and sexual orientation had made me appreciate how he had found interest and value in many unexpected people. But that reply did not quite answer the question, and it has stayed with me ever since. What had I learned about myself in the three years it took to write? I will therefore try to answer the question more fully here, after some preliminary setting of the context in which it was asked.
    I was the last of Edwin Morgan's friends to see him, on the evening before he died, called to his care home in Glasgow's West End as his 'next of kin' in the legal sense. A gay man with no immediate family apart from a few elderly cousins in Edinburgh, Canada and Tasmania, he had increasingly needed someone to buy his shirts, accompany him on hospital visits and discuss his medical treatment, deposit cheques from literary earnings, or occasionally respond in writing to letters or requests. Even more occasionally, I helped draft poems that his hand was now too frail to write, but that his imagination knew should be written.
    Scotland's National Poet or 'makar' (to use the medieval term favoured by the Scottish Executive, but not by its forward-looking laureate), was old, 'a good age' in the Scottish phrase, and he had been suffering from prostate and other cancers for over ten years - defying the original uncertain prognosis of 'six months, or six years'. And yet his passing registered a definite shock across the country, for he was a poet whom many Scots had actually encountered through the varied voices of his poetry. Whether in poems read in primary or secondary classrooms, or seeing him on one of the thousands of school and community visits he made, or through attending his lectures, plays or performances over the years, readers felt connected with him. For many, his great public poem declaimed for the opening of the Scottish Parliament in the new Holyrood building on 9 October 2004 was a highlight of the day.
    I had known him over forty years. He was my lecturer in the late 1960s in the University of Glasgow, my research supervisor for two part-time degrees in the 1970s, and a family friend thereafter. In the late 1990s I became one of his literary executors, and was near at hand when, approaching 80, he began treatment for what he called 'the last dragon' of cancer. This was the final enemy, the one that he would combat for ten years with every creative weapon he posessed. That he remained lively, vital and still intellectually positive about the future in the face of unremitting struggle against pain and indignity made me admire him, possibly even more in his weakness than in his earlier strength.
    During these last years of his life I was writing his life story, with his assistance and approval. When people learned about this, they sometimes said: 'That must be a labour of love'. Well, not exactly, or not always - you can come to know too much about another human being, I sometimes thought. My research and writing about all aspects of his life over that period were combined with looking after the aging poet in practical ways as his strength ebbed and flowed. So elements of detachment and attachment were in tension over a long time. How was I, as a writer, to handle aspects of vulnerability in someone for whom I was also in a caring role?
    When the small Sandstone Press first approached me with the idea of a biography I had been slightly uneasy, but finally considered that the poet himself had often supported such Scottish publishers in the past, and that they in turn had kept him close to his Scottish readership. He himself was keen on the idea, and enjoyed discussing and clarifying aspects of his past life that had sometimes not been fully articulated before, if at all. He was always eager that the full range of human experience should be open to consideration. Working professionally with teachers, I could also see merit in the challenge of creating an accessible biography that would yet reveal new things about a poet whose work was so widely studied in Scottish and indeed British schools.
    This was the first biography of the poet, although its subtitle, A Life of Edwin Morgan, suggests there will be others. In a sense, he had lived not just a double life but a series of them - as artist and academic; as the mild-mannered radical republican who accepted royal decorations; as the avant-garde experimentalist in concrete and sound poetry who excelled in the sonnet form; as an extrovert and lively loner whose charm was matched only by an inner core of steely determination; and as a homosexual man whose activities (still illegal in Scotland during most of his life) might have cost him his job, he thought, in a traditional university. There was multiplicity here that would be hard enough to catch.
    But there was also the fact of the poet's stillness and sadness. He stayed all of his life in one city, and was born, worked and died within the same square mile. Although he visited many countries, he travelled farthest in his own imagination, and his writing seemed to need the stability of a familliar and undisturbed launch pad. He found that he could not write if anyone else was in the same house, even in a different room. Thus family and love relationships were to that extent at odds with his identity as a writer.
    My research was carried out mainly in the huge Edwin Morgan collection in Glasgow University Library, gifted by the poet to the institution where he first studied and then taught. It details his contacts with all the major poets of twentieth-century Scotland, with carbon copies of his own side of the correspondence. It holds photographs and diaries of his trips abroad, as well as surrealistic Scrapbooks, correspondence for journals such as Scottish International that he co-edited, film and radio scripts, letters to and from the widest range of people imaginable, and unpublished poems and translations. He filed not only letters but postage receipts, articles torn from newspapers, scribbled notes of telephone calls. It was all pieces of him, and so, potentially, of interest.
    Work and family commitments left me little time for extensive travel or interviews, although I talked with the friends and poets whom we both knew. The University Library collection already held almost more than enough to cope with. From carbon copies, the poet moved on to a photocopier and fax machine big enough to sustain an independent business operation. Both sides of any correspondence could be easily tracked. Working from his own words allowed me to recreate something of his energy, sympathy, intelligence and humour - in every sense a marvellous man of letters.
    Perhaps that was the source of the earliest thing I learned about myself. Firstly, that I am a much slower writer than he was, as could be seen in the swift handwriting of his first drafts of articles and reviews, with few crossings-out or errors. No wonder, then, that he managed to sustain a prodigious work-rate. My own writing is slower and more labour-intensive, although my wife's critical reading at the end helped to make the style less convoluted and parenthetical. But I also discovered how much I enjoyed the process of gathering information, taking notes, selecting apposite quotations, and also beginning to discern a shape in the story of each decade of his life. Born in 1920, he tended to see his life in decades. Turning research notes into a narrative, however, with tension and interest as well as the factual accuracy of a mass of detail, was a challenge. After all, much of its subject's most precious time was spent in isolated thought or in creativity which, almost superstitiously, he was not inclined to examine too closely.
    Much that I learned in the course of research was intruiging. Suprising rather than shocking, I suppose, although some readers may be shocked by the difference between the poet they imagined from his works or performances and the actuality of his life, which was both more ordinary and stranger than they might have thought. He was always  concerned to make available for scrutiny and reflection the whole truth of what it means to be a human being. Thus, where many writers, including myself, would have exercised censorship or circumspection about what they made publicly available in archives, he mainly did not. Thus he continued to challenge the boundaries of normality. He liked to think radically, and to suprise others into thought by his own unexpectedness. So I learned to be less shockable, and to accept the trust which he placed in me.
    I was suprised, at first, by the sheer struggle he had to become sucessful. His first major collection, The Second life (1968) did not appear from Edinburgh University Press until he was 48. They would not publish a second collection despite the sucess of the first. Earlier, although well known as a translator of Russian, French, Italian, Old English and Hungarian poetry, he could only watch as rival Scottish poets secured contracts with London publishers. Part of him continued to distrust that metropolitan culture, although mainly for political reasons, I think. Another part used the media to keep his own name to the fore, or to make the case for writers whom he thought should be better known. He had survival instinct decribed in the Editorial of The Dark Horse 24 (winter 2009-2010) as a ruthless sense of strategy that poets need to secure a reputation.
    Then the young and struggling Carcanet Press took him on in the early 1970s. That was the start of a fascinating and often touching relationship between writer and publisher. Michael Schmidt excelled in re-shaping Morgan's first ideas for new collections. From Glasgow to Saturn (1973) and Rites of Passage (1976) in particular bear his stamp. Later, Hamish Whyte at the smaller Mariscat Press kept the poet's work before Scottish readers through regular publication of shorter and more stylish collections. Together, these editors established a vital rhythm of alternating Scottish and UK publications which energized both poet and readers.
    Friendship, shared enthusiasm and humour make the editorial correspondence a joy to read. Their (rare) fallings-out are all the more dismaying, as if the relationship suddenly runs into the stone wall of Morgan's determination. With Schmidt, it came when he established Poetry Nation Review, without realising that, to his Scottish poet, the idea of 'nation' bore no relation to the conservative Englishness that he abhorred in the journal's editors, Brian Cox and C.H. Sisson.
    Morgan could be tetchy over literary earnings too, ticking off his UK publishers over royalties and contracts. This punctiliousness over money came from his family background. His father was chief accountant and then director or Arnott, Young & Company, a substantial firm of ship-breakers and iron merchants, established by the poet's maternal grandfather. Family involvement with the heavy industry of Clydeside through depression and post-war decline gave him an authority to write powerfully on the economic decay of the 1970s. His personal contacts with working-class young men gave authenticity to his later dramatic use of Glaswegian speech in the plays which he wrote or translated in the 1990s, when his versions of Cyrano de Bergerac, Phedre and Dr Faustus brought new acclaim.
    His carefulness about money was learned from his parents in early life, just as my own uneasiness about it was also absorbed early. I came from a family where children were many and money was scarce. Both my parents had grown up in the 1930s in mining communities, and both had suffered the early loss of a father. All their education (both became teachers) had been achieved against a background of poverty and loss, which they rarely spoke about but strove to leave behind. The sense of existence precariously dependant on money that might not last led me to turn away from thinking about its reality. Edwin Morgan won a prize for economics at University in the 1930s, whereas I found myself incapable of understanding the subject in the 1960s, and failed.
    However, working with him on his tax returns in the last six years of his life, and also being entrusted with his day-to-day dealings with banks, made me a little less likely to live in denial of money. So I learned that about myself. I would still tease the great republican socialist poet about his account at Harrods and his two (!) American Express cards, but as the poet Richard Price reminded me recently, Harrods is after all preferable to Herod's.
    It was initially shocking to me to learn the depth of antipathy towards Catholics in his conservative, protestant childhood home. Having grown up and worked as a Catholic in that West of Scotland background of sectarianism, I suppose that I should not have been suprised. His father, a freemason, declared that he 'would never knowingly employ a Catholic' in the firm's yards. John Scott, the love of Morgan's life whom he met in the early 1960s, was a store-man who came from a large and easy-going Lanarkshire Catholic family, and so would not have got a job in the breaker's yard. Perhaps that endeared him.
    His relationship with John Scott altered Morgan's poetry forever, and he came to write some of the finest love lyrics in Scottish literature. This 1960s emotional awakening ran alongside positive dealings with people from religious life, such as the Dominican Anthony Ross OP and the Benedictine concrete poet, Dom Sylvester Houedard - all part of a mervellous decade of change. Morgan's attitude towards Catholicism, however, altered in the 1990s. He was dismayed and angered equally by the revival of Orthadox Christianity after the collapse of Communism, and by the atitude of the Church towards homosexuality. Yet even in his last years he was in regular contact with a Spanish Opus Dei priest, discussing theology, philosophy and Scottish culture. He was rarely predictable.
    I am much more predicatable than he was, and feel comfortable with what is customary. But then, I have moved home and job far more than he did, and have had to learn to accomodate myself to the demands or needs of others. I spent my early years in a country town, and later worked for ten years in a school that served another smaller one and its farming hinterland, so I tended to see more of interest in rural life than he did. 'Rural' and 'Irish' were not terms of praise in his lexicon.
    There are, it is true, several qualities that we did share - stamina, determination, the ability to turn rapidly from one task to another in way that can astonish work colleagues, an appreciation of form and colour, an early gift for languages, and introvert's disarming sociability, the ability to disguise nervousness in public situations. Both of us retired as professors from the same university. But from dealings with him and from charting his career I realise how much more radical and rational he was than I, who tend to depend in professional life more often on intuition, native wit and a sense of the dynamics of my discipline. These latter aspects probably made me a more engaging teacher than he could be, especially with younger learners, but his mind was much stronger than mine, an astonishing repository of information and ideas, even into his final years. I suppose these are all things that writing his life taught me about myself. Working to overcome his growing limitations, I also came to face my own.
    I also came to see that my own life as second child in my family of ten, and then as a father of four and grandfather of six children, made me much more used to caring for others than he was. He was a dutiful son and nephew, but was essentially someone who had developed a resilience and self-sufficiency. As an only child, he had had to depend on his own mind and imagination to invent interesting ploys to stave off boredom. Aspects of emotionality attended his relationships with yound men mainly from a working-class background, and I tend so see those partly as a company of pseudo-brothers, a subversive source of fun and mischief-making. But the adapted behavior of the only child would soon re-establish itself with the next commission or inpiration, and he would get down again to the lonely business of writing, a serious one even where the content was witty and strange. For him, the imagined experience was still a real experience. As he told Gerry Cambridge in an interview in 1997, 'poetry is also a projection of yourself into other experiences. The only thing that matters in the end is the intensity by which you do it.'
    Edwin Morgan and I discussed the decades as they were researched and written. His memory remained sharp if sometimes patchy. But so is mine, with less excuse in age or illness. He had the chance to read the text in draft form, but preferred not to look back. He trusted me with his Life as he trusted me with his money, even though he must have been aware of how different from his own my approach to both these tasks would be. By the end, however, he was calling it 'our book', and looking forward to the story it would tell. Just a few days before he died, I informed him that Beyond the Last Dragon had finally been dispatched to the printers, after several of the last-minute emergencies to which small-press publishing is prone, and of which he himself had much experience in a writer's life. He seemed content that we had reached that stage at last.