Colin Mackay

Author of 'Cold Night Lullaby' and a poet of compassion, learning and integrity

Colin Mackay, writer: born Edinburgh 26 July 1951; died Edinburgh 26 July 2003.

An A4 envelope turns up in the post with the name on it of a solicitor one hasn't heard of. It contains a Clampfile with a manuscript of nearly 100 pages called Jacob's Ladder. It is prefaced with a letter from the author which begins:

This is to let you know that I am dead. I committed suicide on my birthday, Saturday the 26th, because continuing to live with my lack of talent was really too squalid a burden to be tolerated any longer.

The MS provides stage by stage Colin Mackay's thoughts and memories during the last nine weeks of his life.

I had known for a couple of days that Colin was dead. I'd known for months that he had told a mutual friend he was "dying". Neighbours whom he wished to care for his beloved cat had been given the same story. One assumed there was terminal cancer. Not so. After his mother died in 2001, Colin Mackay had elected to kill himself. Beside being his birthdate, his chosen day had another significance. He would not have to endure another August, consumed, as his memoir confesses, with envy for all the talented people involved in the Edinburgh Festival . . .

The preceding may make Mackay sound like a nasty, cold character, typical of the self-pitying, self-styled artist with no talent. On the contrary, he was a caring man, with an interesting sense of humour and numerous friends who enjoyed his conversation. And he could write very well. Jacob's Ladder galls one by displaying his great talent for prose varied in cadence and original in imagery and ideas. He had better books, and his best one, in him yet.

The memoir reveals his unusual human complexity. Like R.L. Stevenson, clearly a model for him, he was the only son of devoted parents. But they were "petty bourgeois". There was no nursemaid in the garden of his childhood to foster his imagination in alternative directions.

Born in Leith, he lived in the east of Edinburgh all his life. His father, Hugh, already middle-aged when Colin was born, was a northerner, from the Clan Mackay heartland. He was a Communist librarian with a consuming taste for fine writing. His mother, from a conservative background, 13 years younger, was also a librarian. After she died, Colin lived alone with all their books, and the cat, Max.

The memoir indicates in its very texture how the family library "fucked him up", to echo a writer too recent, perhaps, to mean much to Colin. Father had built his collection up from the 1920s, in the heyday of the Everyman Library. Colin had "Prufrock" and Yeats's "Second Coming" by heart, but most of his many quotations and allusions come from "classics" available in that series. His taste was that of a Georgian essayist born too late. Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, rarely read now, was standard fare for early-20th-century autodidacts. From it Colin Mackay derived the epigraph, so to speak, of his final weeks and last writings: Epicurus's maxim that "Where I am death is not and where death is I am not".

As for so many of us, memories of prelapsarian bliss in early childhood gave way to the misery of a lonely, precocious child bullied at school. Less ordinary was his intense reaction against Edinburgh University. Circa 1970, the ideas of Marx and Marcuse were riding high for students and staff and Scottish nationalism was becoming a serious force. Mackay reacted utterly against both, rejecting his father's socialism and affirming his pride in the history of united Britain. Gladstone and Churchill were heroes for him.

Meanwhile, his now-elderly father had a heart attack and his last 12 years were made miserable for himself, Colin and mother, by his complaining bitterness, then dementia. Mother Margaret, a major smoker, now took to the bottle. For 23 years, Colin, a teetotaller who hated smoking, would nurse her through alcoholism into Alzheimer's.

His start as the writer his father always wanted him to be was not bad - a good collection of verse, Red Ice (1987), and a strange novel in arboreal, rather than florid prose, The Song of the Forest (1987), which won some admirers, though not for human warmth. Two other published novels followed. Meanwhile Mackay, in honoured literary tradition, took on menial jobs which spared his mind for writing. He was nightwatchman at Meadowbank Stadium when he and a colleague decided to take aid to Bosnia in a van called "Muriel".

He saw terrible things there, of course: brains splattered out of skulls, pigs eating human corpses. Worse - in a Muslim village he came across a widow named Svetlana with two young children. She was a Serb allowed to stay there because her husband had been a Muslim who had died fighting for Bosnia. By his own account, it was with this warm woman that Mackay, into his forties, lost his virginity. He drove to Sarajevo to arrange passage for the family on an outgoing flight and returned to find the whole village massacred by Serbs, Svetlana raped and butchered, her daughter shot, her son disappeared. The many corpses lay in a field of blue and yellow flowers.

Mackay in his memoir says that on his return to Scotland he wrote articles for the press about Bosnia - rejected; then a travel book - rejected; a collection of stories, a novel, and in desperation a humorous novel - all rejected. It is indicative of his profound self-contempt that he misses out the Bosnian book that was accepted, Cold Night Lullaby, published by Chapman in 1998.

It is a verse sequence. Whereas Mackay's prose tends towards the sky-ey and "arboreal", his poems, while they are rhythmically well-crafted, are terse and earthed. To my mind the least satisfactory parts of the sequence are the poems where he writes of his love with Svetlana and takes off a few yards towards the gorblimey. But, as a whole, Cold Night Lullaby is an extremely impressive expression of Mackay's humanity.

I think Joy Hendry, his publisher, probably exhausted the huge resources of her address book pushing Colin Mackay's sequence - parts of which had already appeared in 12 journals and one anthology. And Cold Night Lullaby did get exceptional attention for a slim volume from a "little press". Unfortunately some of it came from a war correspondent who said that Mackay got geography and chronology wrong - and the question arose, was this fiction?

As to literary quality, this is irrelevant. Derek Walcott's 1973 verse memoir, Another Life, does not lose value because the poet nowhere hints that he had a gifted twin brother. Even from internal evidence alone, the most famous episode in T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom can't be true. But to the depressive Mackay such literalistic carping mattered, and he may have been deeply pained by awareness that even good friends and true admirers wondered whether Svetlana "really happened".

As he went on planning his own death, the field of blue and yellow flowers recurred and recurred - the juxtaposition of beauty and horror. But the policeman who was first on the scene said he had never attended such a perfectly conducted suicide. Plastic bags on his head, full of drugs, Colin Mackay lay in a bath with a hair dryer plugged in beside it to administer the coup de grâce if needful. Letters and documents were neatly arranged to make execution of his effects straightforward.

There was grim humour in such careful planning. Perhaps Mackay, also, was serious about sainthood. Amongst the allusions and quotations in his memoir, the King James Bible and Bunyan's wonderful Pilgrim's Progress are predominant. He was an atheist, he reiterated, but his disappointment with the world - with failed and brutal Communism, with crass capitalist consumerism - moved him towards "prophecy" in the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

Some honoured him in his own country. Perhaps the unpublished work he left will find for him more admirers, now that trumpets have, or have not, sounded for him on the other side.

Angus Calder

Scotland has lost one of her best contemporary poets in Colin Mackay, writes George Gunn. Suicide always makes for an ugly exit no matter how it is done. There is no romance to it, just pain and anger and death.

Colin, despite what he may have thought himself, possessed talent in barrel-loads. I first met him in the early 1980s when his play Red Cavalry - a riotous and brilliant account of the life and work of Isaac Babel - was read at the Edinburgh Playwrights' Workshop, a unique institution where many of Scotland's finest playwrights cut their teeth. It was the articulate passion coupled with a finely tuned intelligence which marked Colin out as a writer to watch. We became firm friends - our shared north Highland ancestry and our love of poetry kept us talking and arguing long into the night.

Like most things in his life Colin's attitude to the theatre was one of ambivalent complexity. He found it hard to talk to actors. He mistrusted directors (not, in itself a bad thing) but he genuinely did love the community which the theatre enjoys, that sense of a common purpose. But Colin was an introvert and the public nature of the Edinburgh Playwrights' Workshop and the theatre in general he found difficult.

If I have to pick out one thing about this very complicated and single-minded man, it was his poetry. There are very few Scottish poets who could match Colin Mackay's compassion and sheer learning. His lyricism and sometime severity came from a deep Calvinistic root; the history of his father's people from Scourie, in west Sutherland, of emigration, of injustice and the need to find a poetic voice which contained and transcended that pain, these were the centrifugal forces at work in any poem by Colin Mackay.

He never courted popularity no matter how much he may have craved it. He never compromised no matter how tempting it was. But his was a lonely integrity and finally his poems came from a place no one, perhaps not even parts of himself, could reach.