MacDiarmid, Hugh

entitled "Poetry and Science" and ''Even the Least...", written in blue ink on the rectos only of unlined paper, 26 pages and 19 pages, folio, also with corrected galley proofs of "Scottish Nationalist" (published as 'The Upsurge of Scottish Nationalism'), 2 pages, all c.1969, rust marks, nicks and creases

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"...Scotland is regaining its independent voice, and what that voice says when it is fully regained will be as different from anything that can be spoken by an English tongue as Burns is from Tennyson or Carlyle from Charles Lamb..."

MacDiarmid appears to have produced these manuscripts for Jonathan Cape's 1969 Selected Essays. Both essays had previously been published, 'Poetry and Science' in The Hudson Review and 'Even the Least of These' in Mosaic (both 1968), but MacDiarmid chose to rewrite both pieces in longhand. The second essay, an autobiographical account of his Scottish Nationalist beliefs, did not appear in the collection.

Autograph manuscript material by MacDiarmid, the leading poet of the Scottish Renaissance, rarely appears at auction.  

Tom Maschler
This lot is from the personal archive of Tom Maschler (b.1933), one of the leading figures of modern British publishing and identified by the Bookseller as one of the ten most influential figures in publishing of the twentieth century. As editorial director at Jonathan Cape from 1960, he was responsible for shaping the literary scene through the publication of authors including Joseph Heller, John Fowles, Doris Lessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Philip Roth, as well as many of the best English novelists to emerge in the 70s – Amis, Barnes, Chatwin, McEwan, Rushdie. Under his leadership Cape published some 15 Nobel laureates, and his forays into children’s books included bringing together Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake. The ten lots from his collection (lots 188-197) give significant insights into his varied career and literary interests, from Declaration, the collection of essays that made his name, to correspondence with two very different writers with whom he developed a particular rapport – John Fowles and Doris Lessing. They also include a small number of letters by an earlier generation of authors (Raymond Chandler and Malcolm Lowry) that were acquired by Maschler.