Joseph Macleod

Macleod was the son of Scottish parents, and was educated at Rugby School and Balliol College, Oxford. He passed his bar examinations, though never practised as a barrister, preferring a career as an actor, and also had aspirations as a poet. At Rugby he was a close friend of Adrian Stokes, and at Oxford he became a close friend of Graham Greene.

From 1927, he was an actor and producer at the experimental Cambridge Festival Theatre. In 1933 he became the theatre's director and lessee. Five of his own plays were staged there, including Overture to Cambridge (1933) and A Woman Turned to Stone (1934). Under Macleod, the theatre became famous throughout Europe for its avant-garde productions, and staging of lesser known works by great playwrights. Macleod staged some of Ezra Pound's Noh plays, and also some Ibsen and Chekhov (his company, The Cambridge Festival Players, was one of the first in the UK to stage Chekhov's play The Seagull). The theatre was forced to close due to financial difficulties in June 1935, and has remained so ever since. He was intermittently involved in theatre production after this, and in 1952 won the Arts Council Silver Medal for his play Leap in September.

The Ecliptic, Macleod's first book of poetry – a complex book divided into the signs of the zodiac – was published in 1930. It was approved for publication by T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber after a strong recommendation from Ezra Pound, who thought highly of Macleod's abilities as a poet. A long-running correspondence was thus begun between the two poets. Macleod's first book was published alongside W. H. Auden's first book, Poems, and the Poetry (Chicago) editor Morton Dauwen Zabel hailed these two poets as "a Dawn in Britain" in his editorial.[1] However, Macleod's next book, Foray of Centaurs, was considered "too Greek" for publication by Faber and Faber, and although this gained publication in Paris and Chicago, it was never to be published in the UK during his lifetime.[1] Basil Bunting was an admirer of this early poetry, and claimed Macleod was the most important living British poet in his 'British' edition of Poetry (Chicago).

In 1937 Macleod became secretary of Huntingdonshire Divisional Labour Party and stood as a parliamentary candidate, but failed to gain election.

In 1938, Macleod became an announcer and newsreader at the BBC, and he began to write and publish poetry under the pseudonym "Adam Drinan". These poems dealt with the Highland clearances, and described the Scottish landscape in rich detail, using Gaelic assonances. He was one of the first to succeed in rendering the qualities of Gaelic poetry in English. These poems and verse plays won praise from many Scottish writers – Naomi Mitchison, Norman MacCaig, Edwin Muir, Compton Mackenzie, George Bruce, Sydney Goodsir Smith, Maurice Lindsay, and many more. Macleod's "Drinan" poetry was in much demand in both England and Scotland, as well as Ireland and the US. Editors such as Tambimuttu (of Poetry (London)), Maurice Lindsay (Poetry (Scotland)) and John Lehmann (Hogarth Press and New Writing), all requested and published many of his poems in the 1940s. Both "Drinan" and Macleod are included in Kenneth Rexroth's New British Poets anthology (1949), published for New Directions. The "Drinan" pseudonym was not publicly revealed until 1953, after which Hugh MacDiarmid commented it was "so long one of the best-kept secrets of the contemporary literary world".[2] Adrian Stokes received and dealt with Macleod's 'Drinan' correspondence.

Macleod moved to Florence in 1955, where he lived until his death in 1984. His work was re-discovered in the late 1990s, and Cyclic Serial Zeniths from the Flux: Selected Poems of Joseph Macleod, edited and with an introduction by Andrew Duncan, was published by Waterloo Press in 2008.

From 'Cancer, or, The Crab', a section of The Ecliptic (London: Faber and Faber, 1930)

Moonpoison, mullock of sacrifice,

Suffuses the veins of the eyes

Till the retina, mooncoloured,

Sees the sideways motion of the cretin crab

Hued thus like a tortoise askew in the glaucous moonscape

A flat hot boulder it

Lividly in the midst of the Doldrums

Sidles

The lunatic unable to bear the silent course of constellations

Mad and stark naked

Sidles

The obol on an eyeball of a man dead from elephantiasis

Sidles

All three across heaven with a rocking motion.

The Doldrums: ‘region of calms and light baffling winds

near Equator.’

But the calms are rare

The winds baffling but not light

And the drunken boats belonging to the Crab Club

Rock hot and naked to the dunning of the moon

All in the pallescent Saragosso weed

And windbound, seeking distraction by the light of deliverance

For

What are we but the excrement of the non-existent noon?

(Truth like starlight crookedly)

What are we all but ‘burial grounds abhorred by the moon’?

And did the Maoris die of measles? So do we.

But there is no snow here, nor lilies.

The night is glutinous

In a broad hearth crisscross thorn clumps

Smoulder: distant fireback of copse

Throws back silence: glassen ashes gleam in pond

The constellations which have stopped working (?)

Shimmer. No dead leaf jumps.

On edge of a glowworm

Hangs out its state-recognized torchlamp

Blocks of flowers gape dumb as windows with blinds drawn

And in the centre the rugate trees

Though seeming as if they go up in smoke

Are held like cardboard where they are.

Bluehot it is queer fuel to make the moon move.

[...]

We trap our goldfinch trapping our souls therewinged

Sacrifice our mad gods to the madder gods:

We hymn the two sons of Leda and Zeus Aegis-bearer

We don’t. We drink and drivel. My

poor Catullus, do stop being such a

Fool. Admit that lost which as you watch is

gone. O, once the days shone very bright for

you, when where that girl you loved so (as no

other will be) called, you came and came. And

then there were odd things done and many

which you wanted and she didn’t not want.

Yes indeed the days shone very bright for

you. But now she doesn’t want it.

Don’t you either,

booby. Don’t keep chasing her. Don’t live in

misery, carry on, be firm, be hardened.

Goodbye girl: Catullus is quite hardened,

doesn’t want you, doesn’t ask, if you’re not

keen – though sorry you’ll be to be not asked.

Yes, poor sinner . . . what is left in life for

you? Who’ll now go with you? Who’ll be attracted?

Whom’ll you love now? Whom may you belong to?

Whom’ll you now kiss? Whose lips’ll you nibble?

- Now you, Catullus, you’ve decided to be hardened.

How can I be hardened when the whole world is fluid?

O Aphrodite Pandemos, your badgers rolling in the moonlit corn

Corn blue-bloom-covered carpeting the wind

Wind humming like distant rooks

Distant rooks busy like factory whirring metal

Whirring metallic starlings bizarre like cogwheels missing teeth

These last grinning like the backs of old motor cars

Old motor cars smelling of tragomaschality

Tragomaschality denoting the triumph of self over civilisation

Civilization being relative our to Greek

Greek to Persian

Persian to Chinese

Chinese politely making borborygms to show satisfaction

Satisfaction a matter of capacity

Capacity not significance: otherwise with an epigram

Epigrams – poems with a strabismus

Strabismus being as common spiritually as optically the moon

The moon tramping regular steps like a policeman past the

houses of the Zodiac

And the Zodiac itself, whirling and flaming sideways

Circling from no point returning to no point

Endlessly skidding as long as man skids, though never moving,

Wavers, topples, dissolves like a sandcastle into acidity.

Is there nothing more soluble, more gaseous, more imperceptible?

Nothing.

Riddle-me-ree from An Old Olive Tree (Edinburgh: M. MacDonald, 1971)

I was afraid and they gave me guts.

I was alone and they made me love.

Round that wild heat they built a furnace

and in the torment smelted me.

Out of my fragments came design:

I was assembled. I moved, I worked,

I grew receptive. Thanks to them

I have fashioned me.

Who am I?

• Joseph Todd Gordon Macleod (2009). Cyclic serial zeniths from the flux: selected poems. Waterloo Press. ISBN 978-1-902731-34-6.
• Joseph Todd Gordon Macleod – with audio recordings
• Joseph Macleod Collection at the University of Stirling Archives