The wider context

The Wall Street crash of 1929 had led to a worldwide economic depression. Hitler, elected to power in 1933, had systematically dismantled or brought under Nazi control the institutions and mechanisms of the fledging German republic, and was engaging in an agressively expansionist foreign policy. The so-called Munich agreement of 1938 led to Czechoslovakia seceeding the Sudetenland to Germany, in return for German promises of peace. Instead, a year later, having come to an arrangement with the Soviet Union, Germany invaded Poland, leading to the outbreak of war with Britain and France.

The Spanish Civil War began in 1936 when Franco led Spanish troops from North Africa to Spain to overthrow the republican government. Franco received military support from Germany and Italy, and while the government forces recruited sympathetic individuals from across the world (the so-called 'International Brigades'), no equivalent official assistance was forthcoming. The civil war ended three years later in defeat for republican troops and the establishment of a fascist dictatorship under Franco which was to last until his death in 1975.

In the Soviet Union, Stalin had secured his grip on power. Despite his repressive and murderous policies, the USSR was still seen by many in western Europe as the only bulwark against the destructive forces of Nazism and fascism.

While MacDiarmid had reinvigorated Scots in the 1920s, no other writer in Scots of a comparable standard had emerged. Edwin Muir in Scott and Scotland (1935), had decried the use of Scots in literature, and MacDiarmid himself was writing more and more in English. Following a difficult separation from his first wife he had suffered a nervous breakdown, and moved to Shetland, far removed from literary and cultural circles, though he continued to write and publish prodigiously.

'My mother's long illness in 1936, its recurrence in 1938, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the progressive decline of my father's business in the Thirties, my meeting with an Irish girl in 1937, my rash leaving of Skye for Mull late in 1937, and the events of Munich in 1938, and always the steady unbearable decline of Gaelic, made those years for me years of difficult choice, and the tensions of those years confirmed my self-expression in poetry not in action... Munich and the unparalled heroism and self-sacrifice of Communists in the Spanish Civil War almost made me a communist in 1938... Just after Munich, indirect approaches were made to me to accept a Territorial commission in the Eighth Argylls. I was tempted, but replied: 'Not while this government (Chamberlain's) is in power'.' Sorley MacLean, from 'My Relationship with the Muse', in Ris a' Bhruthaich: The Criticism and Prose Writings of Sorley MacLean (Acair, 1985)

See also MacLean's essay 'MacDiarmid 1933-1944' in Scott & Davis (ed.), The Age of MacDiarmid (Mainstream, 1980), for an outline of MacLean's view of the political situation during the late 1930s.

© Ken Cockburn 2002