roderick watson
chatter in an exile’s town’.^15 Cairowas just such a town, and poems like ‘The Streets
of Cairo’, ‘Egypt’, ‘Three Characters in a Bar’, and ‘Letter from Asmara, May 1943’
all recall the louche gatherings of colonial exiles, displaced writers, and lonely
soldiers that Fraser found in wartime North Africa:
I write from one of those strategic places
Where history, not love or verse, is made,
And where men sigh for Aberdeen or Parma
As endless pointless poker games are played,
The winnings to be spent on lime-and-whisky
(A new and barbarous colonial taste):
These evening sessions tend to be repeated:
These days repeat each other, with no haste.
It would be futile, in this air, like you
To sculpture verse or crystallise a myth;
A shabby myth himself the traveller;
Who once had lovers; who remembers kith,
Who notes how women in this climate dry,
But chatters bad French to a Syrian
Dropped in his sex like pebbles in a tarn
Making small circles: sex takes what it can.
········
The soldier is a cosmopolitan,
You cannot trust his habits or his tastes:
He likes to hear the news from home in letters,
But readily returns towards his wastes.^16One man’s weariness is another’s excitement, and Edwin Morgan was to remem-
ber the separation and disruption of war as a kind of liberation, allowing him to
recognize and realize his own homosexuality, away from the repressions of his native
Glasgow, among like-minded men, or at least among lonely men who were willing
to make a generous accommodation. In poems written more than thirty years later,
Morgan remembers the happiness of comradeship in ‘the troopship...pitching
round the Cape in ’41’ (‘The Unspoken’),^17 and, in an interview with Christopher
Whyte, he agreed that ‘The New Divan’, a long poem of 100 irregular stanzas from
1977, was ‘really largely about the war, though it goes back in time, into prehistory
in fact. It’s not just one thing, but to me, it’s my war poem.’^18 His memories of
Egypt are especially evident in the last fourteen sections of ‘The New Divan’, and
stanza 95 reimagines the desert with great vividness:
(^15) Fraser, ‘Exile’s Letter’, ibid. 73. (^16) Fraser, ‘Letter from Asmara, May 1943’, ibid. 79–80.
(^17) Edwin Morgan, ‘The Unspoken’, inCollected Poems(Manchester: Carcanet, 1990), 182.
(^18) Morgan, ‘Power from Things Not Declared’, interviewed by Christopher Whyte, inNothing
Not Giving Messages: Reflections on Work and Life, ed. Hamish Whyte (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990),
148.