Old men can be buggers at hanging on. Hamish Henderson, who died last March at the age of 82, hung on firmly through three books, edited by others: his writings on 'Song, Folk and Literature', collected as Alias MacAlias (1992), a selected letters, The Armstrong Nose (1996) - both edited by Alec Finlay - and Collected Poems and Songs, edited by Raymond Ross. All three books reveal Henderson, by then in his seventies and eighties, as he chose to be revealed. His only other publications had been fifty years earlier: Ballads of World War Two, collected and sometimes also written by himself, in 1947, and Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (1948). This last, honouring the soldier victims of desert war, 'our own and the others' as his dedication put it, ends its tenth elegy with a pledge:

Run, stumble and fall in our desert of failure,
impaled, unappeased. And inhabit that
desert
of canyon and dream - till we carry to the living
blood, fire and red flambeaux of death's proletariat.
The iron in your arms! At last, spanning this history's
apollyon chasm, proclaim them the reconciled.

LRB 23 January 2003 | PDF Download