Iain Crichton Smith

Iain Crichton Smith was born on New Year's Day, 1928, in Glasgow. He was an infant when his father, a merchant seaman, died. His mother had a desperate struggle against poverty, bringing up four children on the island of Lewis. The understanding of Iain's later creative work is to be found in that community with its Free Church allegiance, and the hard life between land and sea, compounded by the loss of 181 Lewis men returning from war service when the Iolaire went down on new year's morning 1919. Iain remembered his pre-war boyhood on the island with affection, and in a poem hailed Lewis as the island ''in the spirit'' he could return to for strength and regeneration when the way was hard later in life.

Iain's mother was a herring gutter, following the catch round the ports, her hacked hands smarting from the salt. He understood the sacrifice that sending him to Aberdeen University entailed, after his schooling at the Nicolson Institute, Stornoway. In those days there were few career opportunities in Gaelic, which was considered by the world at large to be a second-rate, dying language, and Iain decided to become a teacher of English, first in Dumbarton, then in Oban from 1955. His link with Lewis and Gaelic was restored when he bought a flat for himself and his mother in Combie Street, Oban.

His mother was a figure of constancy as she sat by the fire, waiting in her ear muffs to go to the Free Church while her son tapped out yet another poem on his typewriter. Her strength of character appears in many of his poetic studies of old women. Throughout Iain's creative life there was a tension between his admiration for the self-discipline of the Free Church adherent, and his anger at a narrowness of outlook. In one poem he says critically of the stern old woman with the creel of peat on her back: ''Your set mouth/forgives no-one, not even God's justice/perpetually drowning law with grace.''

The death of his mother was a devastating blow, but his marriage to Donalda Logan and his removal to Taynuilt gave him the comfort and security of a family home and devoted relatives, his step-sons Alisdair and Peter and, in the adjacent house, Freddie and Mary Nicolson, Donalda's sister. Because of Iain's extreme sensitivity there was a dark period of depression and hospitalisation which, with characteristic honesty and bravery, he spoke and wrote about. The early poetry is characterised by a preoccupation with cerebral subjects, many of them taken from the discipline of teaching and classroom texts (Hamlet is a recurring character). His poetry had an elegant, rhythmic structure and memorable imagery but, after his marriage, it became looser, more conscious in a Pasternakian sense of the natural world around him, with the foliage of Loch Etive replacing the bare landscape of his remembered

Lewis.

In Gaelic poetry he ranks with Derick Thomson and Donald MacAulay as the most significant poets of the generation below Sorley MacLean. In fact it was Iain's translations of the late Sorley's poems which brought the man from Raasay to the attention of a European-wide public.

Iain was never afraid of experimentation, as the title of the 1965 collection Biobuill is Sanasan-Reice (Bibles and Advertisements) shows. Iain's career as a prose writer began comparatively late in 1968 with his first novel, Consider the Lilies, a story of deceptive simplicity of an old woman's harrowing experiences at the time of the Clearances. I recall Iain showing me Neil Gunn's endorsement of his novel before it was published.

Many other novels and short stories followed. Dr Cairns Craig has pointed to the ''fundamental irony'' on which all Iain's fiction is based: ''. . . he writes always in a grammatical and simple fashion, as though for writer and reader language can be taken for granted; but what we read about is his characters' struggle with the impossibility of any language fitting the nature of their experience.''

It was only in late middle age that Iain was able to come to terms with the Calvinism of his tradition and to express his famous wit in writing through the hilarious pronouncements of Murdo, which he read to delighted audiences. After leaving teaching in 1977 to become a full-time writer, he travelled the land and abroad giving readings. The towering achievement includes: in English - 10 novels, six volumes of short stories, 13 volumes of poetry. In Gaelic - two novels, five volumes of short stories, four volumes of poetry. When Douglas Eadie realised his long ambition to film Iain's fiction, the result was As an Eilean, an evocative amalgam of Iain's stories based on Lewis.

Iain was a delightful person to be with. I cherish the memories of summer evenings on the esplanade in Oban, with him in his habitual fawn raincoat, soft hat, and cigarette, like a detective out of the genre of which he was so fond, while Ian Nicolson (former editor of the Oban Times) and myself tried to keep on the trail of the intellectual sleuth from Lewis, only to hear a ponderous statement reduced to hilarity.

I shall miss stopping at that wayside house by the river in Taynuilt, to see that distinguished bald head bent to the desk in the daily discipline Iain imposed on himself. Many honours - doctorates and prizes, including a Commonwealth Poetry Prize (European Section) and an OBE - came to Iain Crichton Smith, but could never alter his boyish modesty, his eagerness to communicate, or his impish appetite for a joke.

When I visited him in the Southern General Hospital in the last weeks of his illness, the ever-attentive Donalda was by his bed, and on the cover lay a new anthology of poetry. When he passed it to me I saw that it contained his poem Old Woman. I suppose I was one of the first to read that classic poem, many years ago, in a room in Oban, when he told me that its subject was a Lewis cousin he had observed, feeding his ailing wife.

In Old Woman, the man prays ''to God who is all-forgiving to send down/some angel somewhere who might land perhaps/ in his foreign wings among the gradual crops''. I saw that poem become manifest in the Infirmary as Iain struggled so bravely against cancer. Donalda, a nurse by training, took him home to Taynuilt and continued her care and devotion to the end. Iain's exquisite legacy to Donalda, The Leaf and the Marble, which he described as an extended love poem to her, is published by Carcanet next week.

Iain Crichton Smith was an inspired teacher, an invaluable friend, and a writer whose work is certain to endure in English and Gaelic. What a privilege to have known him.