roderick watson
Fraser’s early poems do reflect something of this spirit, showing the influence of
Eliotand Auden in their rather sophisticated and world-weary tone. The young
poet recognizes and defuses the debt by way of a self-deprecatingly ironic pose:
Strange that so young I should carry only
A civil mask and a handful of talents.
Strange that the ‘I’ should have done so soon.
No wonder the mask and the handful are lonely.
No wonder I wander, a crazy loon,
By the shining pavements and the duller moon,
Seeking a poem for my handful of talents.
‘What will you write about? Trees, politics, women...’^2In his poem ‘To My Friends’ on leaving university, Fraser reflected that his
generation was ‘born too late, in this unlucky age’ and ‘Must watch heroic honour
rant alone;|And yet we have controlled our politic rage|And argued, sometimes,
in an easy tone.’^3 His later work, especially the poetic ‘letters’ home from North
Africa, would use this carefully calculated ‘easy’ tone to great effect.
Fraser was well aware of the political issues of the 1930s, and indeed the socialist
manifesto he published as student editor of theSt Andrew’s University Magazineled
to that edition being suppressed. Yet, in the poem ‘To Hugh MacDiarmid’ he reflec-
ted that ‘mine was never the heroic gesture’, and while he admired the older poet’s
‘thought that burns language to a cinder,|Your anger, and your angry poet’s joy’, he
admits that there can be no ‘Scottish Muse’ for himself. Seeing himself as ‘Conven-
tion’s child’, Fraser values the ‘human or the personal’ over any more inflated talk of
cause, nation, or race, and regards MacDiarmid’s ‘Keltic mythos’ with a shudder.^4
In ‘A Letter to Anne Ridler’ he reflected on his own weariness as a working journalist
in Aberdeen and ‘a poet of this century|Pursued by poster-strident images|And
headlines as spectacular as a dream’, suffering ‘a headache from the endless
drum,|The orator drumming on his private anger,|And the starved young in their
accusing group’.^5 Nevertheless, when war was finally declared, Fraser immediately
volunteered and joined the Black Watch at the age of nearly 25. His journalistic
training and his physical awkwardness soon brought him to the Company Office,
followed by a transfer to the RASC. In 1941 he was posted to Cairo to work on
Army publications, followed in 1942 by a move to Eritrea as editor of theEritrean
Daily News, and then back to Cairo in 1944 as a warrant officer and staff writer for
the Ministry of Information. Fraser’s best poems of the war come from these years.
In an army that was to be greatly extended through conscription, George
Sutherland Fraser was part of an increasingly educated and literate body of men
(^2) G. S. Fraser, ‘Problems of a Poet’, inPoems of G. S. Fraser, ed. Ian Fletcher and John Lucas
(Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1981), 19. 3
5 Fraser, ‘To My Friends’, ibid. 36.^4 Fraser, ‘To Hugh MacDiarmid’, ibid. 38.
Fraser, ‘A Letter to Anne Ridler’, ibid. 45.