Morgan & Me - A Memoir by Hamish Whyte

Happenstance Press ISBN 978-1-910131-66-4 122 pp

A Review by Anne MacLeod

Happenstance Press  ISBN 978-1-910131-66-4   122 pp

In MORGAN & ME, Hamish Whyte lays out his long association with Edwin Morgan, perhaps the most influential and inventive poet Scotland produced in the twentieth century.

In 1968, at twenty-one, Whyte was vice-president of Glasgow University’s Alexandrian society, and a little surprised that a lecturer from the English Department should be addressing him and his fellow Classics students on Greek Comedy.  Morgan seemed young (48)   ‘with Buddy Holly spectacles..  .. erudite and, above all, enthusiastic.’  No mention was made of Morgan’s own poetry.  It was not till the next year that Morgan’s second collection The Second Life was published and recommended to Whyte by a medical student friend.  

He borrowed the book and found it fascinating.  It contained concrete poems printed on coloured paper – typeset by computer – which must have been unusual in 1969.  Later in the memoir, Whyte tells us that Morgan was  ‘a believer ..    .. that poetry had to acknowledge science and the contemporary world..’ and perhaps this early use of technology reflected that. At the time, discovering the poems,  Whyte was moved by the work and it prefaced their long literary and personal friendship.

On graduating, he found a job in the Mitchell Library, married and started a post-graduate diploma in Librarianship.  This fostered his interest in bibliography and in Glasgow’s literary scene.  Preparing  Glasgow Poets and Poetry: a representative Bibliography 1950-76 he read every post-war literary magazine and conceived the notion of an anthology of Glasgow poems, an idea well received, but tricky to fund. It finally appeared in 1983, as Noise and Smoky Breath:  an illustrated anthology of Glasgow poems 1900– 1983.  Poems by Morgan were naturally sought, and literary correspondence flowed, but it was not until 1980 that the two men finally met and Whyte  became Morgan’s bibliographer.

Morgan & Me covers a lot of ground.  It maps family life, with all its happinesses and tragedies (the joy of children, the sadness of Whyte losing his wife to cancer in 1999 and in later years finding new happiness with his partner Diana Hendry); it sheds light on the formalities and friendship that developed between Whyte and Morgan over 40 years;  it follows their careers, gives a sense of the responsibilities of the bibliographer,  editor and publisher, and the creativity of the poet;  it addresses Morgan’s coming out at 70, final illness and death.

 And then there are the lunches. A recurrent theme is the lunches shared over the years, whether carefully laid out in Whittinghame Court by Morgan, as Whyte works his way through the copious archive, or the more diverse lunches  of later years in a kaleidoscope of Glasgow restaurants.

There is kindness too:  Morgan’s sending a ‘Santa’ postcard to Morgan’s children, having blown all the money from a translation prize on a Concorde flight to Lapland; and the practical help and camaraderie Whyte and a slew of Glasgow poets were able to offer Morgan in his later years,  There is poignant reflection when, driven round his childhood homes in Glasgow, Morgan talks about his father, deaf from childhood, who would get upset because he thought people were laughing at him.

Whyte wonders, in the end, who Eddie Morgan was, the busy public figure, the man who ‘..gave his poems to the world’.  In 2020, preparing the Morgan Twenties series for Polygon with Robyn Marsack and James McGonnigal, Whyte typed out the poems for typesetting and experienced  something ‘intimate.. .. a glimpse into the..  ..creative processes.’ He felt able to ‘..see the twists and turns, the use of banal phrases to say extraordinary things, the unabashed repetitions..’  He wonders why ‘so many lines end with the.. .. wee connectives that face the empty space to the right of the page: ‘till’, ‘but’, and ‘and’.

In his poem’ At eighty’. Morgan declares ‘unknown is best’.  Whyte is not so sure, but happy to take us with him as he sets out ‘to navigate one of the most important relationships of my life.’

It is a fascinating journey.