Annals of the Five Senses and Other Stories, Sketches and Plays

MacDiarmid Hugh

Annals of the Five Senses (1923) was the first book to be published by C. M. Grieve, the man who became known as Hugh MacDiarmid. It is a collection of intense psychological studies which put us in mind of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. Written in the immediate aftermath of World War I, these "studies" are acts of intellectual survival and promise, some based obliquely on his own life, others daringly prophetic. Male and female viewpoints are explored 'from the inside'.

This volume also includes MacDiarmid's short fiction – a range of stories mainly from the 1920s and 1930s, with brilliant vignettes in vernacular Scots, short plays, a ballet scenario, and hitherto unpublished material.

MacDiarmid's fiction reveals his unsuspected talents as a storyteller in genres of domestic comedy, suspense and horror, from the grand guignol and pastiche of his earliest published tales, including "The Black Monkey" (with debts to Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle), to the devastating comedy of "The Last Great Burns Discovery" and the poignant ambiguities of family relationships in "Andy" and "The Jackknife".

About the Author

Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve) was born in 1892 at Langholm in the Scottish Borders. After training as a teacher, he worked as a journalist, before serving in France and Greece during the First World War. Returning to Scotland, he worked as a journalist, and in 1922 began to publish poems in Scots. From that point he became a key figure in the Scottish Renaissance. He became a founder-member of the Scottish National Party in 1928, and joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1934. He was expelled from both during the 1930s, although he rejoined the Communist Party in 1956. Between 1933 and 1942 he lived with his second wife in the Shetlands. In 1951 he settled with his family at Brownsbank, near Biggar, where he lived until his death in 1978.

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