I was travelling for most of last week, and so it was only while surfing the Internet on the train back from Edinburgh that, in the space of an hour, I learned of the deaths of two of my favourite writers, Frank Kermode and Edwin Morgan, both, coincidentally, aged 90.

Edwin Morgan (copyright www.edwinmorgan.com)

It’s one thing to regret the passing of such writers, ‘full of years’, who both continued working till the very end. But I was already mourning the loss of historian Tony Judt, who died earlier this month at 62, at the height of his powers, killed by Motor Neurone Disease. Judt’s masterwork ‘Postwar’ is simply one of the best history books I’ve ever read. It may seem perverse to describe a 900-page account of Europe after 1945 as ‘exciting’ and ‘unputdownable’, but ‘Postwar’ is both. Judt was also an engaged intellectual in the best sense, arguing cogently and forcibly against the grain on issues like Zionism and Enlightenment values. It’s sad that most people will only have heard of him because of his disease, principally through the remarkable and brave interview that he gave to BBC Radio Four just weeks before his death.

Sir Frank Kermode was of course Britain’s foremost literary critic for almost fifty years. His writing was always subtle and insightful, but also lucid and accessible. But I honour him especially as the inspirer of the London Review of Books, that good deed in a naughty world, which brightens my life when it arrives in the post every fortnight. Kermode wrote over two hundred articles for the journal, the last only weeks before his death, and his name on the cover was always a guarantee of something special.

And what can I say about Eddie Morgan that hasn’t already been said, especially in Robyn Marsack’s sensitive obituary for the Herald? I did have the privilege of meeting him on several occasions, but he led such an interactive life as a writer that there will be few people in Scotland’s cultural scene who can’t claim that! In the early 1970s he came to my school to give a reading, he was one of my lecturers in First Year English at Glasgow University, and then when I worked at the Third Eye Centre in the early 1980s, he was closely involved in several of our projects. Judith and I have very special memories of an evening at Theatr Clywd in North Wales, where we were accompanying three of Scotland’s poetic giants—Morgan, Norman MacCaig, and Iain Crichton Smith—as they gave a poetry reading to complement Third Eye’s touring exhibition Seven Poets. Each formidable on his own, together the three were devastating, trading bon mots, witticisms and insults as if they’d spent their lives in a poetic ménage a trios. I’ve rarely laughed so much or with as much delight.

I moved away from Glasgow in the early 80s, and regrettably didn’t meet Eddie again. But a few years ago–and after he had been diagnosed with cancer–I wrote to thank him for his latest collection, the superb ‘Cathures’, and especially the poem ‘Pelagius’, which begins ‘I, Morgan, whom the Romans call Pelagius…’ and which is a wonderfully humane credo to stand, as Pelagius stood, against St Augustine’s reductionist, destructive philosophy of Original Sin. I wasn’t looking for a reply, but Eddie sent me a page-long, handwritten, considerate response, which was entirely typical of him.

Personally, I think it’s unfortunate that the reports of Eddie’s death were overshadowed by the overblown obsequies for that other notable Glaswegian, Jimmy Reid. It’s not often that you see the full version of Glasgow’s motto: ‘Let Glasgow flourish by the preaching of the word.’ Well, Reid was certainly a skilled and, for some, inspiring preacher, albeit in a secular cause, but I can’t help feeling that it’s through the words of Edwin Morgan—that least preachy of writers—that Glasgow will flourish longest in the international consciousness.

To bring matters full circle, Eddie’s ‘Pelagius’ was first published in the London Review of Books. In the LRB’s current edition (published, of course, before the death of either Kermode or Morgan) Barbara Everett writes an encomium to Shakespeare. She borrows Erasmus’s habit of referring to ‘Saint Socrates’ and, in the light of his unique achievement, suggests the Bard might be occasionally invoked as ‘Saint Shakespeare’. On that principle, I don’t think it’s too excessive to grant Eddie the title denied to his heretical avatar Pelagius, and think of him as ‘Saint Morgan’.

© Robert Livingston, 2010