Edwin Morgan and Risk
Glasgow University, Special Collections
Since the start of the pandemic I have often found myself waking in the morning, groggy from sleep, and then experiencing a distinct sense of deflation as I suddenly remember the full awfulness of our situation and prepare to start the day. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. A day of risk lies ahead. Like most, I have tried to put habits and systems in place to minimise that risk but when just brushing past someone in the street has been problematic there are limits to the amount of preparation you can do. And yet, the other day this familiar sensation was compounded by a strong sense of déja-vu and I realised that I have been here before. I was taken back to the early years of my adolescence, the dawning realisation that I was gay and the growing awareness that I was going to have to plan my life rather more carefully than before. Let me be crystal clear: I do not now wake up every morning and think ‘oh god, I’m gay! Yikes!’ But I did. Once upon a time. And there are still young guys who experience something like this today, especially in the 70 or so countries across the world where homosexuality is illegal and where, in some, this may entail the death penalty.
What I am suggesting here is that there are some parallels between the current enforced restructuring of our lives, its deep emotional effects and the patterns of behaviour imposed by homophobic societies on LGBTQI individuals.
I was born at the tail end of 1959 so by the time homosexual acts were decriminalised in Scotland in 1980 I was nineteen going on twenty. This is not a blog about my own experience of growing up gay in the 1970s. If I mention this here it is simply to note that I experienced at first hand some of the atmosphere of interdiction, the consequent patterns of avoidance and the habits of secrecy that were part of the everyday structure of Edwin Morgan’s life and those of his gay contemporaries over a much longer period of time. And I do see parallels between the structures of homosexual avoidance and our current predicament. Perhaps these are more plot points or co-ordinates than deep emotional affinities but they do permit a more intimate understanding of what gay people have experienced and sometimes still do. Now, we all have a collective experience of what it is like to have to hide away large portions of our existence. Coming into the company of some people in some situations is a risk. We have to think carefully about who we meet and where we meet them. This makes our lives more calculated, more careful and less carefree. This is not a new experience for gay folk. For someone gay of Edwin Morgan’s era, going to an office or a University —for example— required the social equivalent of linguistic code switching. The way he spoke and comported himself at work could not be the same way he acted at home or with gay friends. His entire life was predicated on a whole series of subtle, habitual shifts of register and comportment and structured around secret chasms of activity that could scarcely be spoken about. It has sometimes been said that Edwin Morgan was quite a ‘steely’ character and that, while friendly, he could be aloof and stand-offish. References to the well-known group portrait of Scottish poets by Sandy Moffat called ‘Poet’s Pub’ often note how Morgan is positioned slightly to one side and presented in profile, a little apart from the others. As Mark Coburn pointed out to me in conversation, this is sometimes seen in terms of his identity as a specifically ‘urban’ poet but the positioning is resonant in other ways too. And there have been anecdotes about how Eddie sometimes turned down invitations to actual pubs after poetry readings. The apparently obligatory rite of passage through the macho Scottish culture of strong drink refused. The lack of conviviality noted. But think, again, about our curent situation: one of the reasons governments have been discouraging people from meeting friends in pubs is the assumption —right or wrong— that many people become less careful, less guarded when they have had a bit to drink. Social distancing goes out the window and the virus spreads. I think Morgan was wary of some pubs for similar reasons; in vino veritas and it wouldn’t necessarily be a case of consuming a lot of alcohol, something he wasn’t keen on anyway. Pubs are friendly places where people relax, they do let down their guard. And that made them —unless they were gay bars— places of risk for people of Eddie’s generation. Eddie was careful, aloof, stand-offish with some, partly because he had a significant secret to care for, one that if discovered might have cost him his job and —in certain circumstances— have seen him prosecuted and imprisoned.
It is very clear from the important 1988 interview he gave to Christopher Whyte, however, (published in Nothing Not Giving Messages, edited by Hamish Whyte) that Eddie frequented plenty of gay establishments and it would equally be possible to paint a portrait of Morgan as a great risk taker. His poem ‘Glasgow Green’ which depicts gay cruising for sex, written in 1963 and published in book form in 1968 is remarkable both for the risky activity it depicts and for the fact of its publication. It is diificult for us now to understand how Morgan could have believed he could get away with a poem like this. And yet he did. The poem was regularly taught in Scottish secondary schools without there being any apparent reference to what it was —precisely— about. Perhaps that single fact illustrates better than most the enormity of the situation Morgan found himself in. Could we say that he was living in a culture where the fact and acts of homosexual desire were literally unspeakable, inadmissable? That it was a way of saying that Edwin Morgan and his like did not really exist? They could not be seen or heard. Or rather, they could hide in plain sight. That is one way of looking at it certainly. In his interview with Whyte, however, Morgan claims Glasgow for ‘the bisexual capital of the universe’. So an alternative way of looking at this might simply be to acknowledge that the facts of a poem like ‘Glasgow Green’ were, of course, clear to many but that it may have been thought best not to spell it all out too literally. A kind of cover-up? What better camouflage than teaching the poem in schools? This may be a conspiracy theory too far! Whatever the case, Morgan had to be careful. But it does go some way to explaining why he felt able to publish the kind of poems he did about gay love and desire. Morgan found himself ‘whaur extremes meet’ on a kind of queer cusp somewhere between risk and caution and his poetry reflects that strangely fertile landscape.
Edwin Morgan’s gay love poems are today often, rightly, the subject of celebration and an index of how attitudes have changed. ‘Strawberries’ is probably the most popular, or ‘One Cigarette’. Their celebrity can obscure the very difficult context of their creation and distract from others, particularly those in From Glasgow to Saturn (1973) where the experience of love and desire is more fraught. Indeed this was a point I developed in a survey essay I published a few years ago in The International Companion to Edwin Morgan (ASLS, 2015). Re-reading the love poetry now for this piece, however, I am more tempted to stress both the degree of risk Morgan ran with these poems, how strong the element of joy and celebration is within many of them and how, taken together across the three major collections of the late 60’s and the 70s (The Second Life, From Glasgow to Saturn, The New Divan), they do constitute a gradual ‘coming out’. When re-reading Christopher Whyte’s interview with Morgan I was struck by the poet’s description of ‘Glasgow Green’ as ‘a sort of gay lib poem before there was such a thing’. Usually, critical emphasis is placed on the sense of risk it conjures and the suggestion of male rape. It is often read as a ‘dark’ poem. But ‘Glasgow Green’ certainly makes a strong plea for acknowledgement of that ‘darkness’. As in ‘The Second Life’ and ‘The Unspoken’, from the same collection, Morgan has recourse to a kind of biblical rhetoric in his attempt to lift up that experience and mark it as a legitimate and valid form of human desire:
Providence, water it!
Do you think it is not watered?
Do you think it is not planted?
Do you think there is not a seed of the thorn
as there is also a harvest of the thorn?
(Collected Poems, Carcanet, p.169)
As he writes in ‘Christmas Eve’, which recounts another close encounter with a Glasgow ‘hardman’, these are experiences ‘of dangers as always far worse lost than run’.
One of the other things I noticed as I re-read the love poems is the frequency of references to body parts, mainly hands and arms, with the odd leg thrown in. Sex brings body parts into close-up of course but there is occasionally an odd sense of a whole body being obscured which might be related to the decision to make the gender of the lovers ambiguous. Or, it might be interpreted in terms of a kind of erotic jigsaw puzzle. Over the course of the love poems Morgan attempts to piece together a lover, to make him whole in the naming of parts. I prefer the latter interpretation which also sits well with the argument that Morgan —perhaps without a very clear sense that this is what he is doing— orchestrates a gradual ‘coming out’ over the course of the three major collections of this period. A ‘piecing together’ and a ‘coming out’. As social commentator Chris Creegan has pointed out in a moving and astute essay: ‘Coming Out is an Act of Repetition’, ‘it isn’t a single moment, but to use Eliot’s words “a lifetime burning in every moment.” To put it more simply, it just keeps on happening.’ Something of this repetitive intensity makes its way into Morgan’s long poem ‘The New Divan’. I argued the case for this in an essay I published in Scottish Studies back in 2012 which focussed on the way the long poem ‘The New Divan’ emerges out of obscurity and fairly deliberate obfuscation into the clear light of autobiography towards the very end. This is a poem which emphasises the value and dignity of human bodies as they are torn asunder by war: ‘It was enough: the body, not the heart.’ That is how he puts it in poem 98 which describes the visit of an anonymous squaddie ‘under my mosquito-net’ and some al-fresco sex on Mount Carmel where his partner ends up ‘with a dog’s turd flattened on your shirt-front’. After ninety plus stanzas where location and identity are very hard to pin down, this scene and another in which his love for his friend Cosgrove is explicitly expressed are the clearest articulation in verse of Morgan’s sexual orientation. They were written in the early 70s and published in 1977 a full eleven years before he ‘formally’ came out as gay in his interview with Christopher Whyte.
And yet, in that interview with Whyte, Morgan remains relatively unsure about his achievement in this context. In a significant response he speaks of ‘power from things not declared’, a phrase given greater resonance by the decision to make it the title of the interview. He declares that the poems where he has been ‘open’ about his homosexuality remain unpublished. Elsewhere, however, in the same interview he does identify ‘The New Divan’ as the poem where ‘things become much clearer’. It might be best to see these contradictions as simply a reflection of the very real hesitation and indecision he experienced when it came to thinking about and articulating these matters in those days, pulled as he was between caution and candour. Feelings which had not left him even by the time he gave his interview to Whyte in 1988.
What though of the 80s, 90s and beyond? Risk did not disappear as Morgan turned 60 or even 70. It did change in one significant, fundamental respect, however. With the advent of AIDS in the early 80s. Having had to spend a lifetime carefully managing the expression of his most intimate desires and emotions, he found those same desires and acts subject to the kind of censorship and interdiction demanded by a virus. Where are the poems by Morgan that speak of this predicament, or, indeed, essays or interviews? Much later he would go on to write a long poem that emerges out of his diagnosis with cancer but there seems to be a silence when it comes to the single most important issue to affect gay men in the 80s and 90s. There are only two references to AIDS in his interview with Whyte. And then they are hardly interpretable. When asked by Whyte which books he would ‘want to put into a young gay writer’s hands today’ he says that ‘Post-AIDS problems arise as to who you recommend, what you recommend, with Larry Kramer’s Faggots for example. Books like that already belong to a historical period, I suppose.’ But what ‘problems’ those are he doesn’t say. Is it that he feels AIDS has acted as a break on gay liberation, that he now has to censor himself again when it comes to recommending examples of gay literature? This seems to be confirmed by his later response to a question from Whyte about the existence of a specifically ‘gay sensibility’: ‘There was certainly a very marked American gay sensibility before AIDS which resulted in very outspoken works of literature and the other arts too.’ By 1986 Edinburgh, in particular, was struggling with AIDS mainly due to the significant number of intravenous drug users who were sharing needles. But Glasgow had similar problems. None of this seems to find its way into the poetry or prose although he does comment compassionately in a letter to Richard Price who had detailed his father’s visit to a sick employee. In the absence of published correspondence on the topic —which may yet emerge— it is difficult to be sure but I suspect that Morgan felt that such issues fell more, perhaps, to younger generations of gay writers, many of whom had direct experience of losing friends and partners to the disease. He was not the only one. As Chris Creegan pointed out to me in conversation, Allen Ginsberg, who Morgan had read with interest and some admiration, is similarly circumspect.
Like all gay men at that time though, Morgan would have studied carefully how to manage this extra layer of risk. Initially at least, he would probably have learnt most about that pandemic from his friends and associates in London where he would spend time now and again, unburdened as he was at that stage by the duties of University teaching. And he, too, may have felt a sense of déja-vu at the onset of AIDS. The cautionary approach to life was never to be fully abandoned. At 60, at 70, he had survived the lockdowns of homophobia only to find a virus snapping at his heels.
Beyond that, if we were looking for later examples of Morgan’s appetite for risk, of course, we could turn to the trilogy of plays AD about the life of Christ which brought him the vituperation of Christians of diverse stripes. Another approach though might be to look at his lifelong engagement with poetic form and the risks he was prepared to take in exposing traditional structures such as the sonnet to various forms of experimentation. This might seem like a rather dry literary topic but the division of ‘content’ from ‘form’ is a perennial failing of the critical discussion of poetry. Surely, they are not to be divided and the interplay of caution and risk that enlivens his use of poetic forms infiltrates and orients theme and content. This will be the subject of an essay I’ve written forthcoming in the next issue of Scottish Studies.
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I am grateful to Chris Creegan and Mark Coburn (aka Mark Smith) for their feedback on this piece prior to its publication here.