The poet and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay was a man of fragile disposition and fixed – but not always logical – views. He made model toys that weren’t to be played with and decreed that certain ‘sacred’ vegetables growing in his acclaimed Scottish landscape garden should never, ever be consumed. So where did this leave his young children? Somewhat confused. To mark the centenary of his father’s birth, Alec Finlay unravels the conundrum
IHF – as Ian Hamilton Finlay was known in tribute to the Scottish poet Robert Louis Stevenson, or RLS – was a poet of marble and mutability, force and lyrical sensitivity, Doric columns and the gently nodding bog cotton of our Pentland hillside. His most identifiable style may be the word inscribed in stone, but he experienced language as a Heraclitan and oracular medium. To him, the poem was an exemplary device that had a gift for revealing the metamorphoses words contain. The internationally known garden at Stonypath (known since 1983 as Little Sparta), which fuses the poem-as-object with the composed landscape, was a metamorphosis too. And, as IHF and Sue, my mother, were well aware, without constant vigilance the spot was likely to return into the wild arms of the moor around it. ‘He builds the paths and she plants the flowers,’ as I used to say of them.
IHF hankered for a pre-capitalist way of life and, in ways his critics are liable to forget, he knew the pastoral still existed, something real and just out of reach. He lived by the seasons and had an impractical relationship with money, which I inherited. During one period in the 1990s, a suitcase of Deutschmarks, provided by his German gallery, sat on the study desk. I remember asking for a handout when I was struggling, and him saying, ‘How much do you need?’ as we both tried to understand whether 300 in notes translated into something miserly or generous.
Sue’s unconventionality kept the garden in a neater state than the house. Housework was never a Stonypathian priority. Dusting hardly happened, and not at all once she became ill with chronic fatigue syndrome in the early 1980s – a tradition I honour to this day. I remember an evening spent wiping dirt and cobwebs from the lobby walls, suddenly aware of our abnormal lifestyle as my first girlfriend was about to visit. Sue was incredulous: ‘What are you doing?’ Each wipe of the cloth made the surrounding grubbiness stand out more. When I visited the homes of my friends, I realised farmers and farmhands had thick wool carpets, settees and colour TVs, not rowboats, lochans and garden temples. Their lives seemed terribly exotic.
The distinctions between home and art weren’t always easy for a boy to make out. When I decided to be helpful and stew some rhubarb, IHF was appalled. I was informed that the stems by the pink bridge dedicated to painter Claude Lorrain were, in fact, ‘sacred rhubarb’. This distinguished them from the kitchen variety, which grew out of sight of visitors in the donkey’s paddock. How was I supposed to know pudding ingredients were integral elements in a composed landscape?
IHF typically collaborated with craftsmen; the only things he made with his own hands were the paths and ponds, and his models – fishing boats with handkerchief sails, grey warships stacked with funnels and dowel gun barrels, and Pierrot gliders. These toys, anchored a little distance from the realm of art, were, in a way, even placed above it. A daily walk around the edge of the moor and time spent crafting toys were IHF’s two forms of therapy, and every day he would retreat to his tiny shed (known to my sister and me as ‘Dad’s wee house’), which smelled of Araldite. Ours was a home with subscriptions to Fishing News, Military Modelling and Exchange & Mart but no art or poetry magazines.
As a boy I was confused. Why were there so many toys in our house, when the poet never liked to play? IHF was not a joiner-in with games. To him, a lugger nosing its way between waterlilies was like a cinematic sequence, whereas this kid wanted his boat to win the race over to the far side of the lochan. He would ‘Oooh’ when a breeze tacked the sails through the tiny, vast waves, or when a glider was lucky enough to catch a thermal, lifting its snub nose, like a Betjeman deb becoming Icarus. Along with the garden poems, his toys became loved subjects in his work, celebrated in his collaborations with photographers – Diane Tammes, David Paterson, Robin Gillanders – who caught them in sun-dappled moments.
His reveries of childhood had the same feel as RLS’s evocations, such as ‘The Land of Counterpane’, with its convalescent’s scenery of bed linen, which I knew from A Child’s Garden of Verses. An old barrel was added by the front door to serve as a water butt. With the name J. Hawkins carved on its side, it became a memory of Treasure Island, IHF’s favourite tale.
