In Memorium
Angus (Lindsay Ritchie) Calder, b. 5 Feb.1942, d. 5 June 2008 Angus Calder -- historian, poet and critic -- who has died in an Edinburgh nursing home, was a memorably vibrant personality in the Scottish cultural arena. His worldview was shaped by international socialism as well as Scottish nationalism (to be precise, he called himself, in his marvelous essay collection, Revolving Cultures (1994), a "socialist home ruler"). It is an ideological mix that characterizes many in Scotland: for instance, the region's greatest modern poet Hugh McDiarmid, whose prose works Calder edited, or the latter's illustrious father, the late Lord Ritchie-Calder, son of a Dundee jute worker who became a hot-shot journalist, science writer, UN emissary, and co-founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Calder pere had been a gadfly to Churchill's war cabinet, taking it to task for their handling of the blitz, and was then put in charge of a propaganda unit at the BBC. Later, Calder fils would mine the war for three celebrated and provocative historical analyses. The People's War, written soon after completing his university studies (Cambridge BA in English; Sussex D. Phil in Social Studies), won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1970. The Myth of the Blitz (1991) deconstructs the wartime propaganda about the grit of solidly united Brits. Disasters and Heroes: On War, Memory and Representation (2004) is replete with dark humour. Calder married Jenni, daughter of David Daiches, and after a stint in African universities and some years on the London literary scene, reviewing books for the New Statesman, moved to Scotland. He taught for many years in the Open University in Scotland, while remaining active as a writer and promoter of various literary and cultural ventures; the new literatures in English in particular were close to his heart. In 1981 he published a massive historical work, Revolutionary Empire: the Rise of the English-Speaking Empires from the Fifteenth Century to the 1780s, which Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism described as a "gripping narrative". He co-founded the Scottish poetry library, and for some years co-edited the Journal of Commonwealth literature. It was an essay placed in this journal that inaugurated my friendship with Angus. We met a number of times in Scotland, and many in Dhaka will fondly remember his appearance at a couple of conferences here. In his heyday his home in Edinburgh would frequently be a centre of memorable gatherings. Like his first marriage, his second too -- to Kate Kyle -- broke down, so that when he took early retirement from the Open University he was thrown on his own resources. A drink problem that had long bedeviled him rapidly worsened, but not before a fresh burst of creativity. A winner of the Eric Gregory Award in youth, he now began publishing collections of poems, toting up five volumes in seven years. Some time after the appearance of Gods, Mongrels and Demons: 101 Brief But Essential Lives (2004), a delightful and zany pot-pourri that both Bernard Crick and Terry Eagleton listed among the best books of the year, he developed Korsakov's syndrome, a form of dementia. It was, however, lung cancer that finally brought about his death. He is survived by four children. Kaiser Haq is a poet and professor of English at Dhaka University.
On the Death of George Mackay Brown
Angus Calder Death was bound to come. The great generation is going.People don't live for ever, and there were
so many of these, the pizzazz Scottish makers –
no wonder they seem to drop now like flies
in autumn. Timor mortis ... But it's spring
as George Mackay Brown
would always have been the first to remind us.
There are new generations, regenerations.
We'll be gone before they are consummated.
There is a bitterness in April
passing, the eternal loss of daffodils
but also the sweetness of young faces
which competence and majesty will fill
as they make new worlds out of remote places.
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