The anti-capitalist poet

who made a fortune

on the stock market

Kenneth Roy

 

www.bobsmithart.com

 

As so often happens, the media got hold of the wrong end of the stanza in their reporting yesterday of the spectacular bequest to the SNP by the millionaire poet Edwin Morgan. The story is not that Morgan left £1m to a political party, but that he had it to leave in the first place.
     It seems he was worth double that tidy amount. There is enough to finance a generous scheme for the encouragement of young poets, and heaven knows what else. We must adapt to the uncomfortable fact that the first 'Scots Makar' died last year a rich man.
     It is not simply his fortune which is the source of intrigue; it is how he acquired it. I am still blinking in wonder at the disclosure that he had amassed a share portfolio worth £1.5m. To set down the words 'millionaire poet Edwin Morgan' is remarkable enough; to be able to add that he was a fairly major player on the stock market is rich in satirical possibilities.
     What must the unfortunate crash of 2008 have done to the value of the poet's shares? We must assume that he was not immune to the general condition of capitalists at the time and that there was a destruction of shareholder wealth in his case as in most others. What, then, would the shares have been worth before the crash? How much more would the SNP have stood to gain if only the financial system had not been brought to the brink of collapse by decades of human avarice?
     In 2008, when he was awarded a prize of £25,000 by the Borders Arts Festival in some 'Book of the Year' wheeze, I remember thinking what a sensitive, practical gesture this was, helping out a dying poet, then 88 years old, possibly not terribly well off, making his final months more comfortable. For once I blessed the name of the sponsor, the Scottish Arts Council. Now that we are in possession of the facts, perhaps there might have been a poet worthy of such an award who actually needed the loot. I say 'perhaps' because we will never again be able to take the poverty of poets for granted. Edwin Morgan, from beyond the grave, has seen to that.
     Before he died, Morgan had been elevated to the status of one of those rare characters – the late Queen Mother was the prime example – of whom it was considered bad form to utter a whiff of criticism. Robert Dawson Scott spoke for many when he described him as 'a bona-fide national treasure'. We could not have guessed then the literal truth of this description. If Morgan was ever seen unobtrusively tucking a copy of the FT into his Scottish Review of Books, the event went tactfully unrecorded.

 

     The conventional narrative of Morgan's life was unchallenged until some inconvenient figures got in the way yesterday. We learned from the obituaries that his father had been a clerk in a small firm, working his way up to a seat on the board, and that young Edwin was brought up in an unassuming presbyterian household of few books and fewer pretentions. We learned that he left the parental home at the age of 42 and then fell in love with a man called John Scott.
     'Meeting [Scott] in 1963 was probably the thing that unleashed most of the poems in the 1960s – all the love poems were started off by meeting him and were about him in various ways,' Morgan wrote. He saw Scott constantly, but never lived with him. He preferred his 'lonesome flat' in Glasgow, where, according to Angus Calder, he was reluctant to pick up the phone. The impression is of a detached figure, an outsider. He was stereotyped by Calder as 'unpubbable'. If he agreed to appear at a literary event in Edinburgh, it was always wise to put him on the bill early, so that he could be in bed in Anniesland at a decent hour. Here was a literary lion who guarded his privacy jealously.
     Although his homosexuality was undeclared for many years, his political leanings were never a secret. It was said that he had rejected and reacted against the 'conservative, church-based values' of his parents and, inspired by a left-wing student he had met at university, became either a 'revolutionary communist, or so radical that it would be hard to distinguish it from that ideology'. His poem 'King Billy' was critiqued in one journal as an exposure of 'the terrible things we do to each other when we are brutalised by capitalism' and, according to another, 'generations of socialists and communists recognise a rebel when they hear one...to the end Edwin Morgan knew which side he was on'.
     The truth was more complex, and even the merciless search engines of the internet were struggling yesterday to catch up with Morgan's new reputation as a successful investor. When I keyed in the words 'Edwin Morgan, millionaire', a poem about strawberries appeared on the screen – 'abandoned like a child/from your eager mouth/the taste of strawberries'. I must commit the ultimate heresy and admit that I found this poem slightly embarrassing.
      But what I do know of poetry? No doubt as much as the former lord provost of Glasgow, Alex Mosson, who spoke at the investiture of Edwin Morgan as the city's poet laureate – 'an intimate affair', wrote Robert Alan Jamieson, 'just those of us working in the literary field'. Ah, yes; I can picture the scene; even put names to most of the faces at that delicate soiree. Mosson made a 'brief, stumbling speech' (Jamieson said) and it became clear that 'he didn't know a great deal about poetry'. I am with the former lord provost on this one. Still, it wouldn't be difficult to imagine a better poem about strawberries.
     Yet the mystery of poetry is as nothing to the mystery of people. What the story of Edwin Morgan's share portfolio tells us is how little any of us knows about anyone else.

Kenneth Roy is editor of the Scottish Review