Writers and politics

Salman Rushdie has a letter in The Guardian today in which he declares it "bizarre and untruthful to say that I have a 'fondness for the Pentagon's politics'". The charge was made in in Saturday's paper by Terry Eagleton, who lamented: "For almost the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life." Eagleton's is a ludicrous remark that exemplifies the man's incapacity as a critic. The only conception he has of "questioning the foundations of the western way of life" is his own set of political opinions.

But while I pay tribute to Rushdie's courage over two decades and particular dignity in recent weeks, I direct your attention also to an accompanying letter from one M. Schachter: "Many people from eastern Europe remember Hugh MacDiarmid much less fondly than Terry Eagleton, as the man who reacted to the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 not by leaving but rejoining the Communist party."

Yes, Eagleton really did eulogise the old fraud, describing him as "the great communist poet Hugh MacDiarmid [who] died just as the dark night of Thatcherism descended". Conservative government, to Eagleton, was a "dark night"; Soviet tanks don't warrant a mention against such a nightmare. The best description of MacDiarmid I have come across was Kingsley Amis's, when he referred in a review to "vole-faced, red-shirted Hugh MacDiarmid, arguably (as one tribute has it) the greatest Scottish poet since William McGonagall, inferior to him only in sense of irony". (The reference is cited in a footnote in The Letters of Kingsley Amis, edited by Zachary Leader, 2000, p. 817.)

Substantiating Amis's judgement is the work of a moment. My copy of the selected poems (I've never run to more than that) of MacDiarmid includes the execrable "First Hymn to Lenin", published in 1931, which assures the dead tyrant: "Christ's cited no' by chance or juist because/ You mark the greatest turnin'-point since him/ But that your main redress has lain where he's/ Least use - fulfillin' his sayin' lang kep dim/ That whasae followed him things o' like natur'/ 'Ud dae - and greater!"