{"id":1759,"date":"2019-06-07T09:00:42","date_gmt":"2019-06-07T08:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/edinburghuniversityarchives\/?p=1759"},"modified":"2019-10-11T15:09:02","modified_gmt":"2019-10-11T14:09:02","slug":"this-single-song-of-two-centenary-of-the-marriage-of-edwin-and-willa-muir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/edinburghuniversityarchives\/2019\/06\/07\/this-single-song-of-two-centenary-of-the-marriage-of-edwin-and-willa-muir\/","title":{"rendered":"‘This Single Song of Two’: Centenary of the Marriage of Edwin and Willa Muir"},"content":{"rendered":"

7 June 2019 marks the centenary of the marriage of Edwin<\/strong> and Willa Muir<\/strong>, one of Scottish literature\u2019s great creative partnerships. Acclaimed in their own right as poet and novelist respectively, they worked together as a translating team to bring the novels and stories of Franz Kafka<\/strong> to an English-speaking audience. <\/p>\n

Edinburgh University holds a number of remarkable documents, bearing witness to their long and exceptionally close union.
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At Gen. 1957\/4<\/strong>, we hold five letters sent by Edwin to Willa, while she was recovering from a near fatal hospital operation in spring 1954. Edwin, an Orcadian by birth, and Willa, the daughter of two Shetlanders, privately addressed each other with the Norse \u2018thu\u2019 rather than standard English \u2018you\u2019. In a letter of 13 March, Edwin sends Willa a ring as a birthday gift, marking \u2018a new engagement for a new morning\u2019. He writes: \u2018I am filled with joy at the thought that thu has been given back to me, and that thu has come up from thy darkness like another Persephone to a new Spring [\u2026] I love thee beyond expression, more and more and more.\u2019 <\/p>\n

In another, undated letter, where he addresses Willa as \u2018my darling\u2019 and \u2018my peedie lamb\u2019, Edwin laments: \u2018Thu said before going away that now I could have some peace \u2013 silly words, thu didna ken; for what\u2019s in the house now, without thee, is not peace, but something that needs thee to turn it into peace\u2019. He longs for her return: \u2018And when thu\u2019s well again, whit a time we will have, and how happy we will be. God bless thee, and me through thee. And all my love to thee, over and over again.\u2019<\/p>\n

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Letter from Edwin to Willa Muir<\/p><\/div>\n

In his autobiography, Edwin Muir described his marriage to Willa as \u2018the most fortunate event in my life\u2019 (p. 154). His biographer, P. H. Butter<\/strong> credits Willa with giving Edwin the courage to abandon a secure but unfulfilling clerical post and to launch himself on the literary world. She created \u2018the conditions in which his genius could flower\u2019 (Edwin Muir: Man and Poet<\/em>, p 52). Willa provided not only \u2018love and loyalty\u2019 but an \u2018intellectual companionship\u2019 and a \u2018toughness\u2019 which \u2018kept him in touch with the earth and with common humanity\u2019 (p. 180). While Edwin Muir\u2019s critics and biographers have, perhaps unsurprisingly, characterized Willa as a self-sacrificing Muse, the recent republication of her novels Imagined Corners<\/em> and Mrs Ritchie<\/em> has led her to being recognized as a major contributor to Scottish and European modernism.<\/p>\n

Another document in our archives shows that Willa could be critical of her husband\u2019s work. At Gen. 1972<\/strong>, we hold a copy of Edwin\u2019s early essay collection Latitudes<\/em> (1924). The first seven essays and the last have extensive marginal revisions in Edwin\u2019s hand. A letter to Norman MacCaig<\/strong> (22 May 1958), quoted in Butter\u2019s biography, suggests that Edwin revised the essays for an unpublished, expanded edition of his Essays on Literature and Society<\/em>, on which he was still working at the time of his death in 1959. Muir confesses to MacCaig that \u2018I hadn\u2019t read the book I should say for thirty years, and it was a humbling experience. So much mere nonsense combined with overweening confidence, arrows clumsily notched and shot mainly into nothingness. And yet there were things here and there, choice forlorn fragments, that seemed to be worth doing something with again\u2019 (pp. 92-93). <\/p>\n

The remaining essays in the volume have occasional marginal notes in Willa\u2019s hand. It is unclear when these where added. It may, in fact, be that they postdate Edwin\u2019s death. In a letter of 16 April 1961, Willa tells David Daiches<\/strong> that she is editing a (never published) collection of Edwin\u2019s essays for Chatto & Windus, and it may be that her comments date from this period. <\/p>\n

Sometimes her comments simply read s \u2018Hear, hear\u2019 or \u2018Ha!\u2019, but other comments are more pointed, particularly when Edwin indulges in his youthful passion for the Nietzschean superman. When Edwin writes \u2018For man is ineluctably anthropocentric; he is constituted by evolution and by himself the centre of reference for all created things; he must give meaning and his meaning, to chaos, evil, \u201cnature\u201d\u2019 (p. 170), Willa retorts \u2018and what about art\u2019. When Edwin proclaims that \u2018The spectacle of man, the most intrepid, rash, arrogant and dauntless of all creatures, who has miraculously half-conquered the planet, becoming suddenly pious towards nature, by violating which he has aggrandized himself , sprawling on all fours before the enigma, which, if he is to fulfil his destiny\u2014the mastery over all life\u2014he must solve, must be the strangest and the most shameful which the gods have ever witnessed\u2019 (p. 193), Willa simply writes \u2018Oh dear, Edwin!\u2019<\/p>\n\n\t\t