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Duncan Glen in Edinburgh in 2006.
Photograph by Gerry Cambridge.
DUNCAN GLEN: A TRIBUTE
by JOHN HERDMAN
Delivered at Duncan’s Funeral at Kirkcaldy Crematorium on 26 th September 2008
Thirty years ago this month, people were saying that it was hard to imagine Scotland without Hugh MacDiarmid. During the past few days, several people I have spoken to have said the same of Duncan Glen. He was one of the great Scots of his time – I don’t think that is an exaggeration: a man of prodigious energies and multifarious talents who came to occupy a central position in Scottish cultural life.
Duncan was something of a Renaissance man in two senses: a wide-ranging polymath in the European Renaissance tradition, and an inheritor of the Scottish Renaissance aims and ideals of his mentor Chris Grieve. Duncan had established himself by the mid-1960s as a pioneering expert on MacDiarmid and the Renaissance with a study which is still the most comprehensive introduction to the poet and his influence, and to which all later, more specialised works are indebted. By 1965, too, having progressed via printing and publishing to an academic post in graphic design, he had launched his famous periodical Akros (as the name implies, he aimed for the heights), which ran for more than 50 issues and was one of the key elements in the great ferment of Scottish letters in the 1960s and’70s. Duncan as editor adhered to the highest standards in content and design, was hugely supportive of his contributors young and old, and in his editorials expressed himself always forcibly but without rancour. He was eclectic and generous in his tastes and internationalist in his outlook, but there was never any doubt that he was a champion of poetry in the Scots language.
A fine poet himself, whose work welled up from his intimate love of place and especially of his own roots at the meeting-point of industrial and rural Lanarkshire, he reached for the universal in the particular by developing a distinctive Scots idiom of his own, grounded, as he liked to say, in the language he heard in his head. This sense of linguistic freedom imparted itself to many of his younger contemporaries.
Alongside Akros, Duncan’s activity quickly expanded into publishing, and Akros Publications became one of the supporting pillars of contemporary Scottish writing. His astonishing energy and hard work, combined with a remarkable business acumen less often commented on, made him a supremely effective mail order publisher with an astonishingly accurate sense of just how many copies of any particular book he could realistically expect to sell. As one of his fortunate authors I can testify that everything was executed timeously, efficiently and with the minimum of fuss. In all this Duncan depended crucially on the devoted support and the unremitting labours of Margaret, who, I believe, among many other services, typed out herself the full text of every issue of Akros. They were the ideal partnership in this as in all other aspects of their life together.
Although throughout the heyday of Akros Duncan was living in England and holding down a full-time academic post, this never prevented him from being completely grounded in the Scottish literary world. He kept in touch with everyone and everything and was thoroughly informed about all that was going on. He also managed even from a distance to forge enduring friendships with many of those he published and supported. In the polemical, combative atmosphere of Scottish letters in the ‘60s and ‘70s there were inevitably those who fell out with him, and this did sadden him; but I never came across anyone who had a bad word to say about Duncan as a man. Indeed, it is hard even to imagine that, for he was an endearing man, a lovable man. I am not qualified to comment on his distinguished academic career in the field of Visual Communcation, but what is very clear is that he earned the respect, the esteem, and above all the affection of his colleagues. This was very evident in such tributes as Our Duncan Who Art in Trent, issued at the time of his leaving Preston, and the recent Festschrift for his 75 th birthday, which it is so good that he lived to see published.
After his retirement Duncan and Margaret of course returned to Scotland, first to Edinburgh and then to Kirkcaldy. Retirement was naturally only a notional concept for Duncan: he continued to write and publish prolifically, founded a new journal, Zed 2 O, resurrected Akros Publications, involved himself with the Scottish Poetry Library, and developed his passion for local history, both of his native Cambuslang and of the beloved Fife which became his home. His literary output in a whole range of categories was stupendous: I wouldn’t like to be his bibliographer, but fortunately Duncan, with his customary efficiency and foresight, has already done most of the work himself!
Some years ago Duncan suffered a severe spinal illness which left him immobile and bedridden, flat on his back for months. In this condition, so alien to him, his courage and determination were exemplary. Visiting him in hospital, I was astonished by his patience and good humour. His successful fight back to mobility and several more years of health revealed qualities of character and resilience which happier circumstances might have left partly hidden.
Duncan Glen was a man of vision who saw the universal in the local, who reached out from Scotland to the world, and whose whole life was a practical expression of his convictions. To come full circle, I would like to end with some words of Duncan’s friend and great exemplar, Hugh MacDiarmid, which I feel sum up the vision of this exceptional Scotsman:
Whatever Scotland is to me
Be it aye pairt o’ a’men see
O’ Earth and o’ Eternity.
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