Hugh MacDiarmid’s Typescript ‘Hugh MacDiarmid and the Scottish Landscape, by Valda Trevlyn’ : Landscape as Sign

International audienceIn a 1911 letter, the young Hugh MacDiarmid told his professor, George Ogilvie, of his love of mountaineering: “I am constantly crossing mountains, by unutterably rocky tracks”, foretelling his life-long fascination for the Scottish landscape. MacDiarmid’s nationalist use of the Scottish scenery has already been much commented upon. However, we would like to introduce an unpublished typescript entitled “Hugh MacDiarmid and the Scottish Landscape, by Valda Trevlyn” . The text was undoubtedly written by MacDiarmid himself, not by his wife, Valda, in 1939. Projected as “a study of the descriptive elements” of his “vision of Scotland”, this chaotic prose work mostly considers MacDiarmid’s literary role and acts as a pre-emptive strike against unsympathetic reviewers. Still, underneath its layers of quotations, the typescript offers some keys to understand MacDiarmid’s late poetry and what should be “an adequate description” of Scotland. The poet needs to name the topography of the land and its minute differences to regain historical integrity. MacDiarmid’s poetry relies heavily on lists of topographical details: Direadh I, for example, maps out hundreds of Scottish place-names. Scotland’s various cities and its uninhabited glens embody the emptiness of words: the names, too, are “a world unvisited”. MacDiarmid forces topography onto the page as a linguistic substitute for the absence of “connotation” in modern Scotland. The poet’s landscape is the place where he locates language and its lost signified in foggy modernity. MacDiarmid’s valleys are the embodiment of linguistic signs, homely metaphors for an anti-Saussurean, and inherently romantic, revolution