Scotsman Obituaries: Eddie Linden, poetry magazine editor who influenced a generation of writers

Eddie in Central Station, Glasgow (Picture: Gerald Mangan)

It’s 11 March 2002 and St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral in Edinburgh is packed for the funeral of the much-loved Scottish poet and folklorist Hamish Henderson. After the service I’m standing outside with Raymond Ross, the playwright. “That looks like Eddie Linden?” “Can’t be, I read his obituary in the paper”, we say just about in tandem. But it is Eddie. We raise the topic of the obituary. “Just a wee mistake. I was only ill”, he says.

Sadly, on this occasion it is for real. Eddie passed away in a London nursing home on 19 November 2023 at the age of 88.

Hamish Henderson introduced me to Eddie Linden in Sandy Bell’s pub in Edinburgh sometime, I think, around 1988.

I was already aware of his reputation and instantly recognised him (he had a distinctive face that lent itself to caricature). A biography/ autobiography had been published in 1979. The author was the poet Sebastian Barker but the book employs, mostly, Eddie’s own reminiscences.

Eddie Linden was born in Motherwell on 5 May 1935, an illegitimate child of Irish parents who was adopted by Mary Glenn and Eddie Linden.

However, when Mary died, his new stepmother arranged for him to be put in an orphanage.

From the age of 14, after release from the orphanage, he had various labouring jobs and was sometimes homeless. However, his intellectual life expanded with his involvement with the Young Communist League, CND and the Independent Labour Party.

As a young man, Eddie visited London and was entranced by the theatre and cultural life. Friends thought that he would be back home to Bellshill, where he was staying, before long, but he never returned. Initially, he got a job with British Rail and found inauspicious lodgings with a Greek landlady: one bare room with two single beds and a small gas fire that he shared with an Irish navvy.

However, the frugality of his everyday existence paled against the cultural vitality of London at that time. It was the era of the New Left, established, putatively, through the writings of the historian E P Thompson. One of the key figures was Stuart Hall, the Black cultural theorist who was the founding editor of the New Left Review in 1960.

It was among this milieu, somewhere among the regular Soho haunts, The Partisan Coffee House, Ronnie Scott’s, The French House, that Eddie conceived the idea of editing a poetry magazine.

Aquarius was launched in 1969 and ran to some 26 issues. Each issue of Aquarius seems to have been born out of a mixture of confusion and genius.

To take one issue, for example (No. 12, 1980), Jon Gulliver’s introduction notes: "This edition was conceived in the back of a taxi, somewhere between Notting Hill and Goldsmiths' College. The passengers were confused. Patricia Houlihan thought Eddie Linden was Michael Longley. Eddie Linden thought Jon Gulliver was Douglas Carson. Henry Laverty said nothing. Anyway, it was agreed that Jon Gulliver should edit Aquarius. And that's how Eavan Boland got the job.”

This issue alone had more than 60 contributors, including Seamus Heaney, Gerald Mangan, Hayden Murphy, John Wain, Wendy Cope, Liz Lochhead, Thomas McCarthy, Douglas Dunn and Anthony Cronin.

Perhaps the culmination of Eddie’s editing career was a festschrift edition, “Eddie’s Own Aquarius”, launched in the Photography Gallery in Glasgow in 2005. It contained tributes from, among others, Dannie Abse, James Kelman, Brian Patten and Alasdair Gray.

I was essentially involved in the launch. I say “essentially” as I had the books! For some reason, Eddie had them delivered to my flat in Edinburgh and I was charged with taking them to Glasgow.

When I got to the venue, the audience were gathering and the camera was set up for filming.

However, the contributors and Eddie were not to be found! I managed to trace them to a nearby pub owned by the folksinger Cy Laurie. Strong drink had been partaken and Eddie was notably nervous, about the event and about finding the hotel he was booked into.

Eventually the event got under way. Eddie made a decent rendition of his best-known poem, “City of Razors”, James Kelman railed a little about academia, Tom Leonard delivered a new poem loaded with expletives about Tony Blair, and Alasdair Gray was helped to his feet to read an extract from a short story, for some reason, twice, before falling asleep for the rest of the evening.

The ending to this quixotic event was equally surprising.

There was a crash from the foyer. Apparently two neds had come in, taken the complete takings from magazine sales and ran away.

Eddie Linden himself only wrote two small volumes of poetry but his overall career was extraordinary.

The sheer temerity, gumption and persistence of a man from a notably deprived background to support poetry over several decades while struggling with his faith, sexuality and alcoholism is almost impossible to comprehend.

Also, what was exceptional about Eddie Linden, in common with his great friend Hamish Henderson, is not the extent or quality of his own work but his influence on those around him.

The last time I spoke to Eddie Linden was in 2022 when he phoned me to ask for a copy of a book I had written on Hamish Henderson. I sent him the book and determined to visit him next time I was in London.

Unfortunately, it never happened. Gerald Mangan, the artist, playwright and poet who was a long-standing friend of Eddie and a great supporter of his work informed me of his eventual death in late November 2023.

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