LINDSAY, (John) Maurice

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Nationality: Scottish. Born: Glasgow, 21 July 1918. Education: Glasgow Academy, 1928–36; Scottish National Academy of Music, now the Royal Scottish Academy of Music, Glasgow, 1936–39. Military Service: Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) at the Staff College, Camberley, Surrey, and in the War Office during World War II. Family: Married Aileen Joyce Gordon in 1946; one son and three daughters. Career: Drama critic, Scottish Daily Mail, Edinburgh, 1946–47; music critic, The Bulletin, Glasgow, 1946–60; editor, Scots Review, 1949–50; program controller, 1961–62, production controller, 1962–64, and features executive and chief interviewer, 1964–67, Border Television, Carlisle. Director, 1967–83, and since 1983 consultant, Scottish Civic Trust, Glasgow. Editor, with Douglas Young, Saltire Modern Poets series, 1964; editor, 1976–80, and editor, with Alexander Scott, 1980–89, Scottish Review. Honorary secretary-general, Europa Nostra, 1983–90. Honorary Fellow, Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland, 1985. Awards: Atlantic Rockefeller award, 1946. D.Litt.: University of Glasgow, 1982. C.B.E. (Commander, Order of the British Empire), 1979. Address: Park House, 104 Dumbarton Road, Bowling G60 4BB, Scotland.

Publications

Poetry

The Advancing Day. Privately printed, 1940.

Perhaps To-morrow. Oxford, Blackwell, 1941.

Predicament. Oxford, Alden Press, 1942.

No Crown for Laughter. London, Fortune Press, 1943.

The Enemies of Love: Poems 1941–1945. Glasgow, Maclellan, 1946.

Selected Poems. Edinburgh, Oliver and Boyd, 1947.

Hurlygush: Poems in Scots. Edinburgh, Serif, 1948.

At the Wood's Edge. Edinburgh, Serif, 1950.

Ode for St. Andrews Night and Other Poems. Edinburgh, New Alliance, 1951.

The Exiled Heart: Poems 1941–1956, edited by George Bruce. London, Hale, 1957.

Snow Warning and Other Poems. Arundel, Sussex, Linden Press, 1962.

One Later Day and Other Poems. London, Brookside Press, 1964.

This Business of Living. Preston, Lancashire, Akros, 1971.

Comings and Goings. Preston, Lancashire, Akros, 1971.

Selected Poems 1942–1972. London, Hale, 1973.

The Run from Life: More Poems 1942–1972. Burford, Oxfordshire, Cygnet Press, 1975.

Walking without an Overcoat: Poems 1972–76. London, Hale, 1977.

Collected Poems, edited by Alexander Scott. Edinburgh, Paul Harris, 1979.

A Net to Catch the Winds and Other Poems. London, Hale, 1981.

The French Mosquitoes' Woman and Other Diversions. London, Hale, 1985.

Requiem for a Sexual Athlete and Other Poems and Diversions. London, Hale, 1988.

Collected Poems 1940–90. Aberdeen, Aberdeen University Press, 1990.

On the Face of It: Collected Poems Volume 2. London, Hale, 1993.

News of the World: Last Poems. Edinburgh, Scottish Cultural Press, 1994.

Speaking Likenesses. Edinburgh, Scottish Cultural Press, 1998.

Worlds Apart. Edinburgh, Diehard, 2000.

Plays

Fingal and Comala (produced Braemar, 1953; London, 1958).

The Abbot of Drimock, music by Thea Musgrave (produced London, 1958).

The Decision, music by Thea Musgrave (produced London, 1967).London, Chester, 1967.

Other

A Pocket Guide to Scottish Culture. Glasgow, Maclellan, 1947.

The Scottish Renaissance. Edinburgh, Serif, 1949.

The Lowlands of Scotland: Glasgow and the North, Edinburgh and the South. London, Hale, 2 vols., 1953–56; revised edition, 1973–77.

Robert Burns. The Man, His Work, The Legend. London, MacGibbon and Kee, 1954; revised edition, 1968, 1978; New York, St. Martin's Press, 1979.

Dunoon: The Gem of the Clyde Coast. Dunoon, Town Council of Dunoon, 1954.

Clyde Waters: Variations and Diversions on a Theme of Pleasure. London, Hale, 1958.

The Burns Encyclopaedia. London, Hutchinson, 1959; revised edition, 1970; London, Hale, and New York, St. Martin's Press, 1980.

Killochan Castle, with David Somervell. Derby, Pilgrim Press, 1960.

By Yon Bonnie Banks: A Gallimaufry. London, Hutchinson, 1961.

The Discovery of Scotland: Based on Accounts of Foreign Travelers from the Thirteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries. London, Hale, and New York, Roy, 1964.

Environment: A Basic Human Right. Glasgow, Scottish Civic Trust, 1968.

The Eye Is Delighted: Some Romantic Travellers in Scotland. London, Muller, 1970.

Portrait of Glasgow. London, Hale, 1972; revised edition, 1981; revised edition, as Glasgow, 1989.

Robin Philipson. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1976.

History of Scottish Literature. London, Hale, 1977; revised edition, 1992.

Lowland Scottish Villages. London, Hale, 1980.

Francis George Scott and the Scottish Renaissance. Edinburgh, Paul Harris, 1980.

The Buildings of Edinburgh, with Anthony F. Kersting. London, Batsford, 1981; revised edition, 1987.

Thank You for Having Me (autobiography). London, Hale, 1983.

Unknown Scotland, with Dennis Hardley London, Batsford, 1984.

The Castles of Scotland. London, Constable, 1986; revised edition, 1994.

Victorian and Edwardian Glasgow from Old Photographs. London, Batsford, 1987.

Count All Men Mortal: The History of the Scottish Provident. Edinburgh, Canongate, 1987.

An Illustrated Guide to Glasgow 1837. London, Hale, 1989.

Edinburgh, Past and Present, with David Bruce. London, Hale, 1990.

A Mini Guide to Scottish Gardens, with Joyce Lindsay. Edinburgh, Chambers, 1994.

Chambers Guide to Good Scottish Garden, with Joyce Lindsay. Edinburgh, Chambers, 1995.

Editor, Sailing To-morrow's Seas: An Anthology of New Poems. London, Fortune Press, 1944.

Editor, Poetry Scotland One, Two, Three, Four. Glasgow, Maclellan, 4 vols., 1945–53.

Editor, Modern Scottish Poetry: An Anthology of the Scottish Renaissance 1920–1945. London, Faber, 1946; revised edition, 1966; revised edition, as Modern Scottish Poetry 1925–1985, London, Hale, 1986.

Editor, Pocket Guide to Scottish Culture. Glasgow, Maclellan, 1947.

Editor, with Fred Urquhart, No Scottish Twilight: New Scottish Stories. Glasgow, Maclellan, 1947.

Editor, Selected Poems of Sir Alexander Gray. Glasgow, Maclellan, 1948.

Editor, Poems, by Sir David Lyndsay. Edinburgh, Oliver and Boyd, 1948.

Editor, with Hugh MacDiarmid, Poetry Scotland Four. Edinburgh, Serif, 1949.

Editor, with Helen Cruickshank, Selected Poems of Marion Angus. Edinburgh, Serif, 1950.

Editor, John Davidson: A Selection of His Poems. London, Hutchinson, 1961.

Editor, with others, Scottish Poetry One to Nine. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 6 vols., 1966–72; Glasgow, University of Glasgow Press, 1 vol., 1974; Manchester, Carcanet, 2 vols., 1975–76.

Editor, A Book of Scottish Verse, revised edition. London, Oxford University Press, 1967; revised edition, with R.L. Mackie, London, Hale, 1983.

Editor, Scotland: An Anthology. London, Hale, 1974; New York, St. Martin's Press, 1975.

Editor, Modern Scottish Poetry: An Anthology of the Scottish Renaissance 1925–1975. Manchester, Carcanet, 1976.

Editor, As I Remember: Ten Scottish Authors Recall How Writing Began for Them. London, Hale, 1979.

Editor, Scottish Comic Verse: An Anthology. London, Hale, 1981.

Editor, with Alexander Scott, The Comic Poems of William Tennant. Edinburgh, Scottish Academy Press, 1990.

Editor, with Joyce Lindsay, The Scottish Dog. Aberdeen, Aberdeen University Press, 1989

Editor, The Youth and Manhood of Cyril Thornton, by Thomas Hamilton. Aberdeen, The Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1990.

Editor, with Joyce Lindsay, A Pleasure of Gardens. Aberdeen, Aberdeen University Press, 1991.

Editor, with Joyce Lindsay, The Scottish Quotation Book. London, Hale, 1991.

Editor, with Joyce Lindsay, The Music Quotation Book. London, Hale, 1992.

Editor, with Joyce Lindsay, The Theatre and Opera-Lover's Quotation Book. London, Hale, 1993.

Editor, with Joyce Lindsay, The Burns Quotation Book. London, Hale, 1994.

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Manuscript Collections: National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; Edinburgh University Library; Mitchell Library, Glasgow.

Critical Studies: By Alexander Scott, in Whither Scotland?, edited by Duncan Glen, London, Gollancz, 1971; Studies in Scottish Literature 1971, Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 1973; "A Different Way of Being Right: The Poetry of Maurice Lindsay" by Donald Campbell, in Akros (Preston, Lancashire), April 1974; by Christopher Rush, in Scottish Literary Journal (Aberdeen), summer 1980; by Douglas Gifford, in The Scottish Bookseller, summer 1991; "Collective Consciousness" by Ian Crichton Smith, in The Weekend Scotsman, 6 January 1991; by Carol Gow, in Supplement, Scottish Literary Journal, summer 1991; "Dear Maurice, a Tribute to Maurice Lindsay on His Eightieth Birthday" by John Sutherland and Lester Borley, Times Literary Supplement (London), 4976, 1998.

Maurice Lindsay comments:

I suppose I began writing at an early age because I wanted to preserve and share some tangible aspects of my own experience, to capture the flavor of the fleeting moment, or, as Alexander Scott once put it, "to catch the lyric cry." In my early writing days, under the pressure of the 1939–45 war (the second half of which I spent as a staff officer in the British War Office in London), I wrote too quickly—one never knew how long one might be alive! All the poems from 1939 to about 1950 have therefore been substantially revised in my Collected Poems 1940–90. (Fortunately, until fairly recently I have never had any difficulty in conjuring back the force of early experiences.)

These early poems dealt with love, the sights and sounds of wartime life in London, nostalgia for Scotland, from which I was temporarily exiled, and what George Bruce described as sketches of my "gallery of ancient Tories." They also included the outcome of my brief flirtation with Lallans, or Scots, some examples of which are included in my Collected Poems. Efforts to express the full range of modern experience in a language that survives only in dialect forms, none of which I ever spoke, however, eventually made me move over to Scoto-English, the language I and the majority of late twentieth-century Scots do, in fact, speak.

My middle-period poems reflect the growing up of my family, the sense of place, which I have sought after in many countries, and my passionate interest in music, the discipline in which I was first trained. This indeed perhaps also explains my interest and delight in fixed forms and my frequent use of rhyme, the sense and aptness of which come easily to me. (This concern with the musicality of verse, however, has undoubtedly led to the rejection of my work in some quarters by certain younger academic anthology editors, though I have no doubt that when fashion is no longer a factor in such matters there will be a reconsideration of it!) In America poetry has become very much a campus affair and seems likely to become so too in Scotland. This is not a healthy state of affairs. Poetry should be for people, not just for academics!

In my old age I have been much concerned, on the one hand, with the human comedy and, on the other, with the enormous waste of life that wars over man-made religions, as they all are—inflexible dogmas and false certainties—continually bring about. I have been especially interested in the range of feeling, even of satirical anger, that the sonnet form is capable of sustaining.

The Scottish renaissance movement, of which in my early days I supposed I formed a part, like all other movements, loosens its adherents into their own individualities as they mature. It is quite clear to me that for those who speak a Scots dialect Scots is a proper tongue, as is Gaelic to a Gaelic speaker, even if both languages have increasingly to defend their fringe corners under the assault of English and Americanese issuing from television, now the strongest cultural influence on the majority in the affluent countries of the world.

I have indicated my dislike of dogmatic literary "schools" of this or that, of claques and cliques (both favored groupings easily assumed by the frequently contentious Scot), and my conviction that balanced and dispassionate assessments can only be retrospectively, when the clamors and the credos of such groupings have been silenced by history.

When I was young, the radio producer, novelist, and dramatist Robert Kemp once said to me, "If you want to be a poet in Scotland, you have to possess the stamina of a prizefighter and the hide of a rhinoceros." I can now endorse that diagnosis made more than half a century ago, having recently sent off to the publisher my final collection, News of the World: Last Poems, and, after more than fifty-five years spent in the service of poetry, I think I can understand the puzzlement of the good Glaswegian who recognized my physiog as we stood side-by-side having a pee in the underground lavatory of Glasgow's St. Vincent Place and that subsequently became the quatrain in my Collected Poems 1940–90, in a poem entitled "In a Glasgow Loo":

I hope yuh dinna mind me speakin tae yi, sur, but ahve seen youse on the telly? Whit dyuh dae for a livan? Yuv retired? Yuh wrote? A po-it? Micht yuh no jist as weel hae peed inti thuh wund?

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The publication of Maurice Lindsay's Collected Poems 1940–90 confirmed his position as one of the most consistently satisfying and accomplished poets writing in Britain today. His range of subject and form extends from the barbed fables of Bairnsangs in the 1940s to the astringent satires of his later work, from his fully realized portraits and landscapes of the 1960s to the boisterous and bawdy comedies of the 1980s, and from tender love poems to a poetry of ideas in the autobiographical A Net to Catch the Winds and the finely controlled nostalgia of another autobiographical sequence, "Fifty Years On: Variations on a Glasgow Theme."

The lyric impulse, a celebration of the natural world and peopled landscapes, has been a continuous thread in Lindsay's poetry since the 1940s. The lyrics in On the Face of It and News of the World, two collections published in the 1990s, show him writing at the height of his powers, with the same keen eye for detail and the same robust sensitivity that leave the best of the lyrics, for example, "Highland Waterfall" and the sequence "On Milton Hill," finely poised between the physical and the mystical.

Another constant factor, and one that adds a sense of urgency to Lindsay's work, is his openness to new forms of experience. Apart from satires of religion and politics Lindsay has never colonized specific areas of experience. Instead, he constantly moves on to explore new territories, both thematically and geographically, and the overall effect of these explorations is to convey a sense of restless creative energy. "A Rough Day," from On the Face of It, and, more explicitly, "Directions for a Funeral," from News of the World, show the poet considering his own advancing years and the approach of the ultimate experience—death. But through the creative paradox of his art—the combination of humility and boldness of spirit with which he speaks of final things—Lindsay transforms his poems of mortality into affirmations of life.

The most distinctive development in Lindsay's later work is the increasing clarity and compassion of his moral vision. There are glimpses of this in his poetry of the 1960s and 1970s, and with the publication of the sequence "On Trial," in the 1988 collection Requiem for a Sexual Athlete, the vision begins to be expressed in more forceful and sustained ways. "On Trial" is a "Scottish" poem in the sense that the characters who people the sequence belong to Glasgow or to west-central Scotland; two sequences in On the Face of It, "The Gulf War" and "Making Wars," are, as their titles indicate, international in their scope. The cycle of sonnets that forms the title sequence for News of the World is both local and international. The cycle shows simple human values being betrayed by the manipulators of power and childhood innocence corrupted by the atrocities of war.

These sonnets also suggest that Lindsay is more acutely aware than most of his contemporaries of the vast forces—political, military, economic, religious—that are shaping and distorting the modern world. "News of the World" is a rare achievement; it is a public poetry, a poetry of fiercely conflicting ideas, a disturbing expression of the terrors of violence, and ultimately a poetry of profound tenderness. Lindsay's voice in News of the World remains identifiably Scottish, but the vision is of the universal human condition. Throughout this wide-ranging, deeply satisfying collection, Lindsay's assured technique confirms that he remains as true to the craft of poetry as he does to the experience that prompts the poems.

Lindsay is essentially a poet, but he has made an outstanding contribution to Scottish literature as an editor of several anthologies and of the journal Scottish Review. He also is the author of The Burns Encyclopaedia and the History of Scottish Literature and of critical biographies of Robert Burns and Francis George Scott.

—James Aitchison