John Linklater pays tribute to Norman MacCaig, a fiercely independent man whose moving poetry spoke volumes about his love affair with life

NORMAN MacCaig, who died yesterday aged 85, had a lifelong aversion to being described as a poet. In later years he called himself a ``retired schoolteacher''. What the term poet failed to say anything about were the diversions which were important in his life, and defined him more accurately: fishing for trout or salmon, walking the hills, listening to classical or traditional music, drinking with friends into the small hours.

An intensely private man who loved company. A reserved man whose genial wit could turn abrasive when confronted with fools and interviewers. An apolitical man who could rise to fury on the subject of land ownership or professional politicians or warfare. He embodied the paradoxical nature of his race.

He justified his claim to being ``seven-eighths Gael'' on two generations of family, but he was essentially an Edinburgh man with a mind which longed to be in his favourite Assynt, around Lochinver, in West Sutherland. He was more proprietorial about the pronunciation of Assynt than over any material possessions.

In a rare autobiographical poem, Two Men At Once, he portrayed himself as the man sitting, smiling, and drinking coffee at his tenement flat home in Leamington Terrace while ``the other'' was reminiscing over fiddlers playing at the Culag Bar or trout being hooked in the Veyatie Burn. Assynt was an area he discovered in his youth, and he returned for two months of every year to the cottage he kept there. He called himself a ``stickit countryman''.

He was born in 1910 in Edinburgh, the son of Robert McCaig, a chemist from Dumfriesshire, and Joan MacLeod, from Scalpay, Harris. He said it was a fusion of nuclear proportions, and he was the fall-out. His mother spoke no English until she left the island as a young woman and remained semi-illiterate in that language throughout her life. It was to her, nevertheless, that he attributed his poetic gift. Her adopted English was filled with an uncorrupted richness of metaphor and imagery.

He attended the Royal High School in Edinburgh and wrote his first poem in response to a class writing exercise. In a story he liked to repeat, it was the headmaster, Tubby Grant, who set the exercise. The young MacCaig, being a ``practical'' sort, calculated that a poem was shorter than any other form. A poem it was, and a sentimental one.

He became highly embarrassed with the poetry he wrote after graduating from Edinburgh University with a degree in Classics. A flirtation with surrealism reflected in the obscurity of his first two volumes of poetry and he had become part of a self-indulgent poetry movement, the New Apocalypse, which took its name from a poem of D.H Lawrence and set out to celebrate the ``royal me''. Later he would describe the work produced in this early phase of his career as ``a vomitorium of unrelated images'', and he once offered handsome rewards for every copy of the first two volumes so that he could arrange a public burning.

This literary dalliance came to an end when, in another of MacCaig's favourite stories against himself, a friend returned one of the early books and asked when he would be publishing the answers. It was the most constructive piece of criticism he considered he ever received and it set him out on ``my hands and knees on the rocky road to lucidity''.

It not only altered the work, but also his name. He changed McCaig to MacCaig in an obvious act of disowning the aberrations committed in his first two volumes. The experience also left MacCaig highly suspicious of ever again allowing himself to become part of a movement, literary or otherwise.

With the outbreak of the war he became a conscientious objector, serving with the Northern Combatant Corps as a fire-fighter at Liverpool Docks. His refusal to work in a tank depot resulted in a court martial and he served part of his sentence at Wormwood Scrubs Prison. This episode was to have a severe effect on the progress of a career in primary school teaching, which he resumed after 1944. Low salary delayed his marriage to Isabel Munro, whom he had met at university, until 1950.

It was his great friend and drinking companion, Hugh MacDiarmid, who expressed in The Company I Keep the widely circulated allegation that for years MacCaig's legitimate promotion to head teacher was stymied as a result of the interest Edinburgh councillors took in his war record. It was only late in his career that his promotion to head teacher of Inch Primary School, Edinburgh, was secured. But he enjoyed an unexpected coda to his career after official retirement, receiving an appointment as lecturer, and later Reader, at Stirling University. For seven years, from 1970, he was an inspirational university teacher, who encouraged, presented, and entertained, but never lectured.

If his early school teaching career was subject to thwarted aspirations MacCaig received the compensation of a growing reputation as a poet. From Riding Lights (1955) onwards his reputation grew. He rejected the neo-Metaphysical label, first attached by Louis MacNeice, retorting: ``I can't think in abstractions.''

He modestly applied to himself the term ``miniaturist'', but he was consistently uncomfortable with any ambitious claims made on behalf of himself or his work. His strength was his accessibility and clarity, and the special quality of his work was its wit.

He was the poet laureate of the proletariat of the animal and feathered kingdoms. His poems about frogs, toads, goats, lizards, caterpillars, sparrows, pigeons, ducks, and starlings carry as much of his signature as his better-known celebrations of such aristocrats as the heron. Edinburgh and Assynt informed his landscapes. And, inevitably, the subject of friends found its way into the work of this most gregarious of poets. His valedictory poems to his Assynt friend, the poacher Angus MacLeod, in The Equal Skies (1980) are among the most moving he wrote.

Having himself survived major heart surgery in the mid-1980s he was devastated by the loss of his wife, Isabel, in April 1990. But he rallied for his 80th birthday celebrations in November of the same year. Last year there were 500 admirers and friends in attendance at his 85th birthday celebration in the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh. He was greatly revered and loved.

MacCaig was a fiercely independent man. A gut nationalist, he resisted the movement towards poetry in Scots after MacDiarmid, and for a while suffered abuse as a ``lickspittle lackey to the English ascendancy'' (to quote his favourite among the jibes he collected from the period). But he was no soothmoother. The language he used in his work might have been English, but the accent and inflection was Scots - and this could scarcely have been missed by anyone who heard him read. And there were few who did not. Among many awards, he received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1984. He is survived by his son, Ewen, and daughter, Joan.