Behind the Scenes at the Hooseum
A Review by James Robertson
Radiant Point: Poems from Brownsbank
Lorna J. Waite
Main Point Books/Taproot Press (2024) £10.00
Hard to believe now, but thirty years ago writer-in-residence posts across Scotland numbered in the high teens. Some were hosted by universities, some by local authorities through libraries or culture or education departments, and one or two were attached to other institutions. Ross and Cromarty District Council in the 1980s, before local government reorganisation, was an early adopter of the enlightened policy of bringing poets, musicians and other artists to work in and with their communities, and other councils took the same road. Most often these appointments were half-funded by Creative Scotland’s predecessor, the Scottish Arts Council. In two cases the holders of these posts actually resided in the homes of earlier writers: Brownsbank Cottage near Biggar, where Christopher Murray Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) and his wife Valda Trevlyn lived for 27 and 38 years respectively; and 27 Wilson Street, Perth where William Soutar, suffering from ankylosing spondylitis and cared for by his parents, spent the last fourteen, bedbound years of his life.
Together, all these posts formed a network of creative writing hubs from the Northern Isles to Dumfries and Galloway. They provided writers at different stages of their careers with financial security, usually for two or three years; they facilitated writing groups, school visits, reminiscence projects, readings and performances, publications and cross-disciplinary collaborations; and they brought authors (poets and fiction writers primarily) to a wide variety of locations, urban and rural, to practise their craft. Yet, despite their effectiveness in bringing a variety of benefits to communities for relatively little cost, they were always soft targets when institutions and councils came under pressure to make savings. Especially after the financial crash of 2008, many of them were axed. When the host organisation ended support, Creative Scotland’s matched funding also ended. I may be wrong, but at present I can think of only eight long-term (a year or more) writing residencies or fellowships in operation.
Among the casualties were the Brownsbank and William Soutar Fellowships, which had their funding withdrawn in 2010. They had hosted seven writers each over two decades, but the buildings have been lying mostly empty since and are in grave danger of being permanently lost as significant cultural spaces. Perth & Kinross Council, the current custodians of the Soutar House, are seeking to sell it, whilst Brownsbank, now in the hands of a registered charity, MacDiarmid’s Brownsbank, is in poor physical condition and has had all its contents removed to safeguard them from damp and deterioration. A plan for complete renovation of Brownsbank was scuppered first by the Covid emergency and subsequently by a huge rise in building costs. Despite widespread vocal approval - from government, cultural bodies and the public - for the proposals to restore the cottage and reinstate the writing fellowship, so far the necessary funding has not been found. Meanwhile, each winter leaves it yet more fragile.
These writers’ homes may not be as grandiose as Scott’s Abbotsford or as iconic as Burns’s birthplace, but they are special in their own ways. The house in Perth contains the downstairs bedroom, redesigned and refitted by John Soutar, a master joiner, so that his son Willie could have a panoramic view from his bed out into the garden - The Garden Beyond as the title of Douglas Eadie’s wonderful 1976 film about him has it. Brownsbank, a traditional farmworker’s but-and-ben with a kitchen and bathroom extension built on the back in the 1960s by friends and supporters of the Grieves, is A-listed not for its architectural worth but solely because of its long association with MacDiarmid, one of the greatest Scottish cultural figures of the 20th or indeed any century.
I am doubly biased here, as a trustee of Brownsbank and as the first holder of the Brownsbank Fellowship from 1993 to 1995, two years that changed my life and enabled me to become a full-time writer. The thought that such an opportunity may not come anybody else’s way in the future is heartbreaking, as is the idea that we, as a nation, might be careless enough to lose such an extraordinary and unique place. The same goes for William Soutar’s home in Perth. Joni Mitchell’s words are ringing out clear: ‘Don’t it always seem to go / That you don’t know what you’ve got / Till it’s gone?’
In 2011-12, after the long-term fellowships at Brownsbank ended, a further band of writers took up short residences of a few weeks. Among these was Lorna J. Waite, who stayed there in September of 2011. Radiant Point: Poems from Brownsbank is a finely produced book of the 38 poems she wrote or started in that month, along with photographs she took and essays and notes connecting MacDiarmid’s ambition and achievement with those of Robert Burns. The book has been compiled and edited by Murdo Macdonald, Lorna Waite’s husband, following her death aged 58 in 2023. In many ways, it is a product of love.
For Waite, an Ayrshire-born, Scots-speaking woman, Burns was ‘symbolic of an unashamed, intimate, non-violent part of the psychological life of Scottish culture…He is perhaps…the most radiant lens, through which the mythological qualities of feelings particular to the inner and outer life of a place and people can be absorbed and reflected.’ Her time at Brownsbank, living not in the shadow of MacDiarmid but illuminated by his presence, and by Valda’s, led her to think about the influence on her of both his words and the cottage’s physical space. She came to think of it as ‘the hooseum’, domestic yet full of artefacts, intimate yet expansive, contemporary yet historic: ‘The cottage was “hame”, and I felt “at hame”. It is in the nature of the cottage itself and the imagined presence of its former occupants that this ability to be yerself is so rewarding for the writer.’ Having spent two years sleeping in Hugh MacDiarmid’s bed and surrounded by Valda’s decorative eclecticism in every angle and on every surface of the hooseum, I can vouch for the accuracy of that observation.
A poster of MacDiarmid’s poem ‘The Bonnie Broukit Bairn’ was proudly displayed in the classroom of the secondary school teacher, John Hodgart, who, Waite says, ‘taught us our voices were worthwhile’. Waite’s ‘enchantment with astronomy’ was sparked by that poem and thus ‘poetry became an entry point to science as well as orbiting the Scottish democratic tradition of culture, philosophy and politics’. Some of the work that emerged in her stay at Brownsbank is a further exploration of these links. In her application to go on retreat there, reproduced in the book, she explained, ‘The radiant point is a term used by astronomers to describe the point in the sky out of which comets emerge with their spectacular entrance and idiosyncratic orbit.’ She expanded this as a metaphor for the poetry of MacDiarmid and Sorley MacLean and the historical analysis of their friend the philosopher George Davie, perceiving them as ‘bright flashes of illumination on the horizon which have left trails for the contemporary writer to follow’. Accordingly, in ‘The Net of Space’, we find:
It's aa mapped oot, woven thegither wi co-ordinates,
Magnetic fields an orbits under spatial lines,
Flowin interplanetary markins no seen,
Makin nummers oot o the void o space,
Haudin us aw in laws o physics
Movin wi the rhythm o solar wind,
Lank nets slippin under the cauld tide o distance…
Waite’s poems do not parrot MacDiarmid but honour and build from him. Her voice is her own - strongly affirmative of her class and sex, and blazing with intelligence and generosity. Her essays, as Murdo Macdonald says, show ‘her commitment to poetry in both Scots and English, with due consciousness of Gaelic’. There is no posturing here: the basic simplicity of the cottage would not allow it. ‘Now we have all we need,’ Valda said to Chris as they settled into this, their last sanctuary, provided by Thomas Tweedie, the farmer on whose land it stood and who in all those years never charged them rent. ‘Conscientious Objection and Cleaning’, written for Valda, is a poem of Waite’s from a longer sequence:
I tenderly clean the framed photo,
Not the national portrait of the public realm,
Proud and private Chris, wearing the robes of the honorary doctor, sitting
Old man on a bench, a Siberian woodcutter’s face.
The compliment pleased you.
I dust away the debris of my skin,
Sweeping away strands of blonde hair on terracotta carpet,
Evidence of living in the museum of your memory.
Lorna J. Waite’s work is strikingly original and Radiant Point is a book that demonstrates what a rare voice we have lost. Its contents make as strong a case as any for the retention and expansion of writers’ residencies in spaces like Brownsbank. Her concluding remarks capture this beautifully:
The month-long residency was of enormous benefit and of great significance, galvanising new work as well as energising and intensifying my understanding of, respect for and commitment to the work of Hugh MacDiarmid and his importance in world literature. By living at Brownsbank, his importance internationally is grounded in the experience of ‘hame’ in a way which is of inestimable value. I expect the currents and ripples of my time at Brownsbank to affect my future work for a long time.
Is it too much to hope that Lorna’s words, written in 2011, may be a blueprint for Brownsbank’s future, and not an epitaph?
For more information on Brownsbank Cottage, visit https://macdiarmidsbrownsbank.org.uk
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