An in-depth interview with Gavin Crawford
1. “E fui calato in mezzo a quella gente” Why an Italian title for a poem written in Gaelic?
Gavin Crawford put some questions to Christopher/Crìsdean about one of the poems in Ceum air cheum, ‘E fui calato in mezzo a quella gente’
GC So why an Italian title for a poem written in Gaelic? And is there any connection with the epigraph in German?
CW/CMacIB In some ways this is still a very embarrassing poem for me, because it describes an experience of almost total alienation. From the language you are using, the people you live among, the members of your family, even from your body and your sex. The alarming thing is that it feels so close to madness, one aspect of which is a total inability to communicate what you are going through to other people.
GC And in spite of that, a poem is a form of communication. And this one communicates very clearly.
CW/CMacIB English was the only language I was brought up to speak. I always felt it was the wrong language, not the one I ought to be speaking. Fionn MacColla has a marvellous passage about his childhood in Too Long in This Condition, where he describes his father letting drop a few words in Gaelic, at which point the boy pounces on them. He always knew there had to be another language! And here it was.
Even when a language has been lost for more than a generation something lingers on which children can sense. I replaced English with Italian from the age of about 23, so what happens at the start of the poem is emerging from a place you understand, and a language you can identify with, into circumstances that are totally alienating.
When I was about 7, I remember telling my schoolmates that I wasn’t Scottish at all, I was actually Swedish. It was my way of saying that I felt no perceivable connection with my family or the community I was living in. I think this is a common enough experience of gay children. With me it was particularly strong.
GC Would you say then that this was a gay poem?
CW/CMacIB There are certainly very gay things in it. Like not believing them when they tell you what the purpose of your sexual organs is. Or that moment when someone passes by you in a station crowd and there is an instant, agonising recognition before they vanish. The Gaelic here very carefully uses the word “pearsa”, a person, which of course is feminine.
That’s a very gay experience. At least among people of my generation. Everyone around you is different, then all of a sudden you come upon somebody who is the same as you. There’s an amazing passage in one of Tsvetaeva’s letters to Pasternak, where she says more or less: ‘Recently I saw someone on the street, resembling you, he looked at me for a long time, it must have been the attraction between two members of the same race.’ She’s not talking about being gay, though she easily could have been. It’s one of those points where Tsvetaeva could so easily be a gay man.
Of course it’s always mistaken to limit these experiences, to confine them to a particular group or a particular situation.
GC You haven’t said anything yet about the epigraph from Hofmannsthal.
CW/CMacIB That comes close to the end of the opening scene of the biggest opera he wrote for Richard Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten. The Empress, who isn’t actually a human being, she belongs to the spirit world, has just discovered that, because she still doesn’t cast a shadow after a year of marriage, her husband the Emperor is doomed to turn to stone. The only way she can get a shadow is by plunging down out of the skies into the world of human beings, which she and her nurse immediately do. I take it the link to the poem is obvious.
GC Not so obvious to me…
CW/CMacIB She’s going down of her own free will into a place where she doesn’t belong and where she will be forced to assimilate if the person she loves is going to stay alive. Something is missing in her, she isn’t fully human. The shadow symbolises that.
GC Is the same true of the person speaking in the poem?
CW/CMacIB I’m not sure about that. I suppose that could be an implication.
When I was 18, a friend smuggled me into Glasgow University music department, and I listened to that scene using headphones. The music of the opera is very uneven, it has real ups and downs. The first 30 minutes, however, must be among the very best music the composer ever wrote. I was totally bowled over, no doubt because it spoke so closely to my own experience.
GC Music is very important in the poem.
CW/CMacIB Music has a glorious power to pass on forbidden information under conditions of repression and censorship. Think how important jazz and the Beatles were in the countries beyond the Iron Curtain in the 1970s and 1980s. You can’t quite compare it to growing up educated by Jesuits in Catholic Glasgow in the 1950s and 1960s. But that was pretty dire in its own way. You can take my word for it!
GC You’ve told me that it’s one of the oldest poems in the book. Written earliest, I mean.
CW/CMacIB Yes, that one got written at the very end of the 1980s. I read it at the launch of the second Polygon anthology of gay and lesbian writing in Scotland, edited by Joanne Winning. Looking back, those were heady and heroic days. Edwin Morgan had recently come out, to coincide with his 70th birthday. All sorts of spaces were opening up that had been unthinkable before. I remember I was nervous about reading the whole thing. It struck me as far too long. But Joanne said No, go ahead and read out all of it.
GC The ending strikes a very grim note. I mean, speaking of death as the gateway home.
CW/CMacIB For me that alludes to a sense that what goes on here on earth is an interlude, somehow anomalous. The really important things happen before and afterwards. You can find that in certain esoteric teachings. But I am allergic to doctrine of any kind, so I wouldn’t honestly know how to pursue that particular line of thought…
2. A poem about Christopher’s at times troubled relationship with Sorley MacLean aroused some controversy when it first appeared. For what reasons?
Gavin Crawford and Christopher Whyte/Crìsdean MacIlleBhàin discuss a poem in 6 sections from Ceum air cheum/Step by step which is addressed to Sorley MacLean/Somhairle MacGillEain, ‘Gnùis nach dealbhaichear air bearradh a’ Chuilthinn’, ‘A face that won’t be etched along the ridge of the Cuillin’ in Niall O’Gallagher’s English translation
GC I suspect this has to be one of the more controversial poems in the volume. After all, Sorley MacLean is a major figure in 20th century Gaelic literature, enormously respected and revered. And your attitude to him is not entirely uncritical.
CW There are no reserves whatsoever about the quality of the poetry. My relationship with the man himself, to the extent that I actually had one, was more complex.
For me there is an image which corresponds very closely to what the poem turned out to be doing. You can never tell, when you are starting out on anything that ambitious, exactly where it’s going to take you. The image is of a table totally cluttered with objects. A person brings their joined forearms with clasped hands down onto the table, then gradually separates them, so that everything on it gets knocked down to the floor.
It’s an inter-generational poem. Addressed by a member of one generation to someone from the generation that preceded, asking him to get out of the way, to clear space. So that different things can be written and written about.
GC Is this the anxiety of influence Harold Bloom was so fond of discussing?
CW/CMacIB Hardly! Of all the poets around my age, I honestly believe I am the one to have been least influenced by Sorley’s work in my own writing. It comes from a very different place. But then, the person who wrote a poem never sees it quite as clearly as other people do. Your vision is inevitably clouded by the process you went through when writing it.
GC Each section of the poem uses a different metre. What was the thinking behind this?
CW/CMacIB The most significant things that happen in a poem are often unconscious. They happen because they need to, without you making a decision about it. Perhaps I felt that such a long poem would be unbearably monotonous if it was all written in the same metre.
Then there is another aspect. One poet is addressing another and he needs, how shall I put it, to put himself through the steps. To show that he possesses the necessary skills for the craft which they are both engaged in.
I have to confess that I was particularly excited by what happens in the final section. I mean, what I refer to as the “galloping amphibrachs”. An amphibrach is a group of 3 syllables with the stress in the middle. Each line has 4 and the pattern is followed pretty strictly. I hadn’t expected it or planned it but it seemed to work well in Gaelic. Looking back now, I see I was feeling my way towards this metre in the third section, without realising what I was doing.
GC Your account of that first meeting, at the Edinburgh Festival in 1984 you told me, is very striking.
CW/CMacIB I’m actually more haunted by that encounter the further away it gets. Memory establishes a link between who we are now and what happened in the past. We ourselves are moving and changing all the time. Consequently no two memories of the same event are quite the same. Then at a certain stage you start remembering your memory rather than the event itself!
GC But you wrote nothing down about it then?
CW/CMacIB No, I didn’t. I came away frustrated because, rather than explaining the difficult passages I was struggling to translate into Italian, Sorley talked about the people behind the poems. He told me that the man the Scottish Eimhir was involved with had been “a notorious homosexual”. It never occurred to him he might have one sitting right there in front of him!
Only years later did I ask myself how I would have reacted if he had said “a notorious Jew”. Maybe I should have lifted a hand and mumbled quietly “Me too”. For a man of Sorley’s generation, expressing prejudice of that kind was perfectly acceptable.
The whole thing was veined with paradoxl. On the one hand, he was reiterating my exclusion, as a gay man, from “the world of Gaelic poetry”. Whatever you take that to mean. On the other, he was exposing another gay man at the heart of the most important Gaelic love story of the 20th century.
Later I was told that person’s name was Ronald Hird, an Edinburgh architect and conservationist who, sure enough, had a long term male partner. What precisely Alison Milne, which is the name I have been given for the Scottish Eimhir, was doing being seen around in his company remains a mystery. For a while Sorley considered putting her initials at the head of the 1943 Dàin do Eimhir. Then he changed his mind.
GC You refer in the poem to the hostility between MacLean and Derick Thomson.
CW/CMacIB That, too, has become part of modern Gaelic folklore. Anyone who looks at Thomson’s letters to MacLean in the National Library will see that the hostility appears to have begun on MacLean’s side. Thomson asks him in the 1960s for more contributions to Gairm, then tries to find out if anything has come between them.
GC Did Thomson ever speak to you about MacLean in disparaging terms?
CW/CMacIB Never. His behaviour in that respect could not have been more correct.
GC How would you respond if someone told you they found the poem ungenerous? Over critical? Ungrateful, even?
CW/CMacIB The fact is, nobody has ever said that.
Cathal O’Searcaigh and Chris Agee at Irish Pages sat on it for about a year, then decided that they weren’t going to take it after all. So it ended up with New Writing Scotland, which was in fact absolutely the best place for it to appear.
What the poem does is chronicle a problematic personal interaction, rather than criticising the man himself or his poetry. It actually implies that his achievement was so massive as to constitute a potntial obstacle for anyone writing after him. You can hardly call that being ungenerous!
3. A direct address to the poet’s mother, ‘At a grave that is not there’ counts among the most eloquent and troubling poems in the whole collection.
Gavin Crawford in dialogue with Christopher/Crìsdean about a crucially important poem in Ceum air cheum/Step by Step.
GC I found the poem addressed to your mother, ‘Aig uaigh nach eil ann’/’At a grave that is not there’ both moving and profoundly disturbing. Can it be true she has no grave?
CW/CMacIB It is. She doesn’t. She was cremated and my father sent her ashes back to the undertakers to dispose of. When he died in his turn, my brother did the same thing with his ashes. So neither of them has a memorial. That says a lot about the quality of the relationships in our family. For me it was sheer Hell.
Perhaps I am to blame in some small way for what happened. After my mother’s funeral, my father asked me to look into the possibility of getting a “lair”, which is the Scots term for a place to put the family remains. I was perplexed. I could not work out why he was asking me of all people, the family renegade, the black sheep. His sworn enemy. My mother died at the end of May and all through that calendar year I was living in Barcelona. So I put off doing anything. Months passed before I found out what had happened to her ashes.
GC I was disturbed and, to be honest, a little shocked at the lines where you identify the face of evil with your mother’s face.
CW/CMacIB The fourth commandment still holds sway in Scotland! Speaking ill of your parents or, indeed, of any immediate family member, is absolutely unacceptable.
People have different ideas about what evil means. Unfortunately, I consider evil to be an active principle in the world. Akhmatova speaks in one of her poems of evil hurrying across the hills with a rucksack on its back, constantly scheming, in movement.
I do not think evil is a mirror image in the negative of good. They are energies of quite different sorts. It’s like the sudden arrival of the big theme in G major in the first movement of Carl Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony. That isn’t a reflection of what has gone before, or a reaction to it. Quite simply, this is “also” there. Once it has made its presence felt, battle is inevitable. Though of course good is about infinitely more than merely combatting evil.
Once evil has been identified and labelled, it so to speak loses interest in itself. The times that matter are when it is still camouflaged and can get down to work almost without being detected. When it can pass itself off as something utterly ordinary, not in any way glamorous or unusual.
That is when it puts our vigilance to the test and deserves to be feared: ‘gnùis an fhir a bhios a’ reic nam pàipear,/ mar eisimpleir, no chanas ri a nàbaidh/ mar a tha an t-sìde caochlaideach,/ is iad a’ feitheamh air a’ bhus sa chiudha’; ‘the man who sells the morning papers,/ or else the one remarking to his neighbour,/ while they are standing in a bus stop queue, / how unpredictable the weather is’, as the poem has it.
GC To speak of your mother as the embodiment of evil is a shockingly damning accusation, even in a poem which takes sexual abuse of a child by one of its parents as the theme.
CW/CMacIB Don’t forget that the major villain in this poem is not the mother, but the father, even if he only emerges tangentially. One way of putting it could be, that there are certain parents it would be preferable never to have had. I like that sentence because it confronts you with an utter contradiction. Are there many people who would claim it would be better for them never to have been born? And in that case, is coming into the world an event that must always be welcomed, no matter how unfavourable the circumstances?
Individuals who identify as having been sexually abused by a parent are subjected to unbelievable pressure to shut up. It’s not that people don’t believe them, they just don’t want to be confronted with the facts. I mean, that protecting children from their birth parents, when necessary, is a hugely problematic task.
When no one willingly identified as gay, it was feasible for the man or woman in the street to claim they knew nobody who was. The same goes for child abuse. On top of which, speaking out is a means, admittedly feeble, of showing solidarity with the children this is happening to this very moment, as we speak, who all too often are unreachable.
A therapist in Edinburgh once told me that the abuse specifically of male children in Scotland had the dimensions of “a hidden holocaust”. His precise words. If so, it gets far less attention than the historical holocaust inflicted on the Jews. One reason could be that children in our society are denied so many rights. They cannot vote and, because they have no money of their own, have minimal importance as consumers.
GC Why don’t we get back to the poem. Did you find it difficult to write?
CW/CMacIB No, it wasn’t especially difficult. I did it in two stages. The challenge was, not actually wanting to write it. Plus the voices inside that kept on repeating, You don’t want to write this poem, and nobody is going to want to read it. But many people write all the time against a background of choruses like that inside their heads. You just have to be stubborn and persist.
Two bits were added on after it was finished. I had forgotten to include them. The funny thing was, each had to occupy precisely 5 lines of verse, otherwise the overall pattern would have been disrupted.
One was about chasing after my mother and finding she is already on board a ship departing from the wharf. That woman managed to be eternally unavailable, even after she died, given that she has no grave. The other was the baleful jewels which ought to have been buried along with her, to accompany her on her journey, ‘an t-iomagain, a’ ghràin ort fhèin, an ciont’; ‘confusion, guilt and disgust with yourself’.
For me that poem is a spell, a form of exorcism. Once certain things have been said between two people, you can never put the clock back. You cannot return to how things were before. After I had written it, for me there were things she could no longer hope to get away with, not even if she was in spirit form. That’s the power words have.
GC You did your own English translation for this poem.
CW/CmacIB English was the language my mother understood, and those words needed to reach her, at least initially, in my voice. But the translation into Scots by Niall O’Gallagher is stunning. Chaste, disciplined, restrained. For me it represents a high point of the whole book.
4. ‘Peering into the Darkness’ battles with the tormenting issue of what actually happens to loved ones who have killed themselves.
The last extract but one from an extended interview in which Gavin Crawford and Christopher/Crìsdean discuss the poems in Ceum air cheum/Step by Step.
GC ‘Sealladh san duibhre’/’Peering into the darkness’ speculates about what happens to people who kill themselves. Suicide is not what you might describe as an easy topic. You already touched on it in a poem from 1989, ‘Uinneag ann am Buccleuch Street’, ‘A Window in Buccleuch Street’.
CW/CMacIB Yes, and in Bho Leabhar-Latha Maria Malibran/From the Diary of Maria Malibran there is a poem about someone very close to me who tried to kill himself by vaulting over one of the parapets on George IV Bridge. Thankfully he didn’t succeed. It’s a topic people respond to with panic in Scotland. I’m afraid I put that down to Calvinism. In Catalunya or in Hungary, attitudes are more matter of fact. It’s just one among many life choices. Sad, but legitimate. If you love someone and they choose to do kill themselves, it’s only natural to ask yourself where they have gone. One of the factors that made the Reformation so hard to accept for people in Mediterranean Europe was, that by abolishing Purgatory, you cut off the possibility of continuing to care for loved ones after they were dead. Of working to make things better for them. Besides which, in itself Purgatory is not an unappealing idea. As if there could be room in Heaven for practically everybody in the long run. Václav Havel described people who commit suicide as “guardians of existence”, because they fix a bottom line beneath which being alive isn’t worth the effort. There is a part of many of us that doesn’t want to be alive. Certainly with me. Luckily it’s not the only part. In my very first novel, Euphemia MacFarrigle and the Laughing Virgin, I divided the main character into two, Gerald and Daniel. One commits suicide, while the other goes on living. It’s a way of honouring the part that would prefer not to be here.
GC You supply two epigraphs, one from Rilke and one from Akhmatova.
CW The Rilke poem is, for me, the best ever written on the topic of suicide. It concludes: “Triumph, you say? Surviving is what matters.” He wrote it when the 19 year old son of a friend, Graf von Kalckreuth, took his life. He had insisted on enrolling in the Prussian army but he had a physical handicap and was treated very harshly. At that age, he had already translated Baudelaire into German.
GC Technically it’s a very controlled poem. Ten stanzas of twelve lines each, divided into groups of three.
CW When you’re dealing with such touchy subject matter, technique can offer a handrail to cling onto. It also reassures the reader that someone here is maintaining overall control. Things are not going to get totally out of hand. If you look carefully, the first four sections are self-contained. It’s not until the very middle of the poem that a sentence runs across the division between two sections. The poem has one image I especially like, when time and eternity are spoken of as the two faces of a coin tossed into the air to settle a dispute. I can’t say why, but I see a debt to MacDiarmid here. As if I were paying tribute to him.
GC You conclude with a series of images of patience.
CW/CMacIB Well, one of the antidotes to suicidal feelings is detached, even whimsical curiosity about what happens next. Hanging on to discover the sequel. The young tree is one I saw while motoring alone through Knapdale. I actually stopped the car and tramped across the moorland so as to embrace it. It looked so brave and isolated. Trees deserve a lot of respect from us. It’s one of the worrying things about Christianity, that converting the Germanic tribes for example involved again and again cutting down trees that were considered sacred. Our continued existence on earth depends on trees. Some of that reverence has to be expressed again.
GC How important do you think structure is to the success of a long poem?
CW/CMacIB At the time some of these poems got written, I was studying the work of Joseph Brodsky, who made a speciality of the longer poem. That was instructive. His Russian isn’t easy, but I had German and Italian translations to help me. I studiously avoided the English translations, some of which he did himself, probably because of the analogy with Sorley. You can get a lot of fun by running the syntactical pattern against the metre. I mean, making sure sentences don’t finish at the end of a line, but placing the full stop somewhere in the middle. My image for that is a cat turning round and round before at last it settles, curling its tail around its body.The closing parts of the sentence are the tail, and the tip of the tail is the full stop. You wait to see where it lands. A lot of this happens without conscious planning, through instinct and example. With the Mary Flora poem which concludes the book, a pretty long one, I noticed that as the end came nearer, more and more sentences were end-stopped. They finished at the end of a line. That could serve as a signal to me, and to the reader, that the poem was finally drawing to a close.
5. Ceum air cheum ends with a heartfelt tribute to a woman from Skye who deeply influenced Christopher’s understanding of Gaelic tradition and Gaelic culture.
The last of five extracts from an interview in which Gavin Crawford and Christopher Whyte/Crìsdean MacIlleBhàin discuss the poems in Ceum air cheum/Step by step.
GC In the closing section of your Sorley poem, there is an extended polemic against parallel text publication in Gaelic and in English. In this book, every poem gets translated. One of them twice. Aren’t you being inconsistent?
CW/CMacIB Actually the polemic is about self-translation and the way it is received in Scotland. Statements like, that Sorley wrote his poems “first” in Gaelic, or even that he was a major poet in English too, are profoundly unhelpful. Any serious assessment of the poems has to proceed from the Gaelic text. Sorley himself underlined this. People will do anything to convince themselves that learning Gaelic is unnecessary, you can get by perfectly well without having access to the language. That’s not true.
Three to four decades went by before Sorley produced those English versions. Since then, some poets have taken to writing the two more or less simultaneously, as if they were interdependent. Meg Bateman progressed from producing facing versions to poems in English only, as if the Gaelic text had been rendered superfluous.
But don’t forget that the essence of a polemic is that you have to listen to both sides. This is just my own take on the question!
GC It’s always interesting to observe how a poet chooses to close a book. Here in final place you have a poem that describes what you spoke to me of as “the dishwashing summer”. How much of it is autobiographical and how much invented?
CW/CMacIB Oh, it’s all autobiographical. Nothing has been invented.
I mean Mary Flora’s zimmer frame, her sister Katie’s conversations on the phone with their brother Kennie’s wife in an inextricable patchwork of Gaelic and English, Margaret the maid discussing the state she found the sheets in when doing up the bedrooms in the morning, or the talk about sex change operations while we were having our elevenses. Not to mention the afternoon wanking sessions, that massive fart in church, Mary Flora telling me incest occurred particularly frequently in Harris, or the woman having dinner whose grandmother had been a witch.
The image of Mary Flora with her 1st class honours degree in Celtic gutting fish, however, I got from Iona McLeod. That was borrowed.
GC Which summer was it? And how did you end up on the staff at Ord House Hotel?
CW/CMacIB It was 1975 and I was aged 22. David Butchart, who is still a dear friend, had worked there during one of his student vacations. His girl friend at the time, Anne Beale, had a Nicolson mother who was related to the sisters, as well as to Sorley MacLean. In fact the first, indirect contact I ever had with the poet was via David and Anne.
It was an astoundingly open and lively environment, full of wit and fun. Margaret was famed for coming upon David laboriously making butter balls one morning and prononuncing: ‘David, those balls are as big as your own!’ At one point they took on an additional chamber maid. Talking was equivalent to breathing for that woman. I remember Margaret staggering into the room where I was polishing glasses, raising the back of her wrist theatrically to her forehead and saying: ‘It would be a punishment for me to stay in there one moment longer!’
At the same time, none of the three of them was capable of using Gaelic with me. The conditioning went too deep. Gaelic was restricted to a tightly defined inner group. To use it with an outsider would have meant betraying that group. It would also have been somehow demeaning, disrespectful towards the person from outside.
GC For ‘Aig uaigh nach eil ann’ you used stanzas of 5 lines. Here each stanza has 7. How on earth did you arrive at that number?
CW/CMacIB I cheated! When the poem was more or less finished I did some sums. I couldn’t make up my mind about 6, 7 or 8 lines per stanza, though 8 struck me as over long. I discovered that I could get 25 7 line stanzas by adding just 2 more lines. That was what I did.
Numbers are so important in poetry. Nico Naldini, Pasolini’s cousin, describes pausing outside the door of the room where Pasolini was working at the very end of the war. He could hear tapping. It was Pasolini beating out the number of syllables in each line with a pencil on the table, making sure he got his hendecasyllables right.
You can’t conceivably have any kind of music without counting. That’s what a conductor does, on a glorified scale. Counting visibly and unmistakably. Free verse has become so prevalent it gives the impression that technique can be abolished. You don’t need technical skills any longer, poetry has been democratised. The truth is, free verse presents huge technical difficulties. Writing in metre is much simpler.
GC You still haven’t explained why you gave this poem such a significant position.
CW/CMacIB Much of my work in Gaelic has been about being an interloper, an intruder who in fact had no entitlement to use it. Learners in Scotland continue to be regarded with more suspicion than happens in Ireland or in Wales. It mattered to show that I did have interaction with native speakers at a significant stage, even if through the medium of English. Today I would claim that a language belongs to the people who use it. It’s as straightforward as that. End of story!
I rejoice in the fact that my connection to Gaelic came in part thanks to a highly educated woman who spent much of her life running a hotel kitchen and cooking for guests. Who I suspect had never come close to a man at any point in her existence. Mary Flora was strikingly beautiful, even when crippled and in her late 60s. Between us there was a sort of urgency of recognition, as if she, too, located in me something that she needed.
Few things bring more satisfaction than openly acknowledging a debt of gratitude. I hope that’s what this poem does.