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Canongate Classics
An Autobiography
From his sheltered childhood in Orkney to the turmoil of industrial Glasgow, Edwin Muir was witness to some of the most traumatic years and events of our modern age. And yet, in his life and in his art, he was constantly haunted by the symbolic 'fable' which he longed to find beneath the surface reality of the everyday. From his dream notebooks to his travels in Eastern Europe, Muir paints an unforgettable picture of the slow and sometimes painful growth of a poet's sensibility as he comes to terms with his own nature amidst the terror and confusion of the twentieth century.
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1954
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About the author
Edwin Muir
143 books31 followersEdwin Muir, Orcadian poet, novelist and translator noted, together with his wife Willa Anderson, for making Franz Kafka available in English.
Between 1921 and 1923, Muir lived in Prague, Dresden, Italy, Salzburg and Vienna; he returned to the UK in 1924. Between 1925 and 1956, Muir published seven volumes of poetry which were collected after his death and published in 1991 as The Complete Poems of Edwin Muir. From 1927 to 1932 he published three novels, and in 1935 he came to St Andrews, where he produced his controversial Scott and Scotland (1936).
Between 1921 and 1923, Muir lived in Prague, Dresden, Italy, Salzburg and Vienna; he returned to the UK in 1924. Between 1925 and 1956, Muir published seven volumes of poetry which were collected after his death and published in 1991 as The Complete Poems of Edwin Muir. From 1927 to 1932 he published three novels, and in 1935 he came to St Andrews, where he produced his controversial Scott and Scotland (1936).
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December 17, 2018Edwin Muir's life as set out in his autobiography crossed many currents of the twentieth century.
He was born in the Orkneys in a farming community however the family was disconnected from a life bound by the seasons and rural traditions and moved to Glasgow when he was fourteen. There one by one his parents and siblings died over a short period of time. In his later poetry there is the sense of both an intense connection to the natural world and alienation from it. Something of that comes through in The Horses.
He survived the first world world by volunteering for, but being rejected for service, and married the school teacher Willa Anderson, later as a writer herself known as Willa Muir, after writing We Moderns, in which among other things he enthusiastically promoted the philosophy of Nietzsche - in the versions and translations that it was available to him at that time.
The next step in living through the collision of man into modernity was for the newly married couple to leave Scotland, travel in France and Germany and learn enough German to knock out translations of Franz Kafka which were for many years to remain the standard ones available in English. Our understanding of Kafka in English has been profoundly shaped by their translations.
Back in Britain Freudian psychotherapy allows him to unlock a rich dream world which fed into his development as a poet, although he gave up the therapy because it was clearly to much for him once he started to have waking dreams of being in a rowing boat under attack by sea monsters in the middle of the afternoon.
His death during the Nuclear Age seems to tie a knot on the threads of his life, the rush in to a modern age that is all consuming.
He was born in the Orkneys in a farming community however the family was disconnected from a life bound by the seasons and rural traditions and moved to Glasgow when he was fourteen. There one by one his parents and siblings died over a short period of time. In his later poetry there is the sense of both an intense connection to the natural world and alienation from it. Something of that comes through in The Horses.
He survived the first world world by volunteering for, but being rejected for service, and married the school teacher Willa Anderson, later as a writer herself known as Willa Muir, after writing We Moderns, in which among other things he enthusiastically promoted the philosophy of Nietzsche - in the versions and translations that it was available to him at that time.
The next step in living through the collision of man into modernity was for the newly married couple to leave Scotland, travel in France and Germany and learn enough German to knock out translations of Franz Kafka which were for many years to remain the standard ones available in English. Our understanding of Kafka in English has been profoundly shaped by their translations.
Back in Britain Freudian psychotherapy allows him to unlock a rich dream world which fed into his development as a poet, although he gave up the therapy because it was clearly to much for him once he started to have waking dreams of being in a rowing boat under attack by sea monsters in the middle of the afternoon.
His death during the Nuclear Age seems to tie a knot on the threads of his life, the rush in to a modern age that is all consuming.
April 1, 2025
P.18: Their form of address was 'boy' and 'lass', as it still is in Orkney among men and women, no matter what their age.
P.187: I realised that I must live over again the years which I had lived wrongly, and that every one should live his life twice, for the first attempt is always blind.
P.191: Yet that humble anonymity may for all I know have been the germ out of which grew the terrible impersonality which thirty years afterwards could declare an absolute division between men according to their race or their class, and treat those who fell on the wrong side as of they were scarcely human.
P.197: It was the age of Expressionism and New Objectivity. The Expressionists carried freedom to a point where it lost all meaning and became elaborate torment. They were driven by a need to pour out the last dirty dregs of the mind, as if it were a duty to appal themselves and their readers; one could hear in their works the last hysterical retchings, perhaps the death-rattle of freedom.
...we did not know of that terrible and apparently real freedom which assumed that since everything was possible everything was allowable...
P.277: As I look back on the part of the mystery which is my own life, my own fable, what I am most aware of is that we receive more than we can ever give; we receive it from the past, on which we draw with every breath, but also - and this is a point of faith - from the Source of the mystery itself, by the means which religious people call Grace.
P.187: I realised that I must live over again the years which I had lived wrongly, and that every one should live his life twice, for the first attempt is always blind.
P.191: Yet that humble anonymity may for all I know have been the germ out of which grew the terrible impersonality which thirty years afterwards could declare an absolute division between men according to their race or their class, and treat those who fell on the wrong side as of they were scarcely human.
P.197: It was the age of Expressionism and New Objectivity. The Expressionists carried freedom to a point where it lost all meaning and became elaborate torment. They were driven by a need to pour out the last dirty dregs of the mind, as if it were a duty to appal themselves and their readers; one could hear in their works the last hysterical retchings, perhaps the death-rattle of freedom.
...we did not know of that terrible and apparently real freedom which assumed that since everything was possible everything was allowable...
P.277: As I look back on the part of the mystery which is my own life, my own fable, what I am most aware of is that we receive more than we can ever give; we receive it from the past, on which we draw with every breath, but also - and this is a point of faith - from the Source of the mystery itself, by the means which religious people call Grace.
November 12, 2016
Muir, Edwin. An Autobiography
Edwin Muir’s An Autobiography, first published in its entirety by The Hogarth Press in 1954, tells of Muir’s early life in Orkney and Glasgow, his life in Europe and his work for the British Council and his return to Italy, where he discovered ‘that Christ had walked on the earth, and also that things truly made preserve themselves through time in the first freshness of their nature.’
As with the Brownings, Edwin and Willa Muir were a devoted couple who found harmony in their joined lives and the pursuit of literature. After a life of wandering through Europe, Muir found his spiritual home in 1950 as Warden of Newbattle Abbey College, his students being ‘clerks, fitters, turners, tube-makers, railwaymen, typists, journalists, teachers, civil servants.’ They came mostly for a year, many returning to their work, others winning scholarships, one, a miner with a dissertation on Kant, another, a tube-maker with an essay on Paradise Lost.
Having read at least a dozen autobiographies/memoirs over the past couple of years, I found Muir’s account of his life the most re-readable. Although I had to accept his statement that all his life he had been ‘a Christian without knowing it ,’ I was baffled by his concluding statement that ‘we receive from the past … from the source of the mystery itself, by the means which religious people call Grace.’ But what precisely do we receive? It can only be a sense of the past - which is surely a circular arguement - we receive from the mystery of the past a sense of the past. How else? What else?
Certainly Muir is obsessed with his own past, his love of the friendship found among the people in his childhood homes of Wyre and Garth, of close family ties and the fields and animals he encountered; the awful shock of being uprooted to Glasgow, where he encountered nothing but lies and villainy, rudeness, ugliness and dirt. These urban experiences at a young age never left him and he became a recluse, finding solace in books. He experiences of school are almost terrifying, the terror of seeing children beaten with up to twelve lashings of the tawse, the unpredictabilty and hostility of teachers, and the loss of siblings to diseases of various kinds such as cancer and tuberculosis.
Muir (1887-1959) is probably best known today for his collaboration with his wife Willa in their translations of Franz Kafka or for his critical studies. But of his novels I most enjoyed The Marionette, the story of an idiot boy who cannot face the ‘real’ world until he destroys his precious marionette. The changing relationship between the boy Hans and his father Martin who introduces his son to the terrifying world of real people is both haunting and moving.
Edwin Muir’s An Autobiography, first published in its entirety by The Hogarth Press in 1954, tells of Muir’s early life in Orkney and Glasgow, his life in Europe and his work for the British Council and his return to Italy, where he discovered ‘that Christ had walked on the earth, and also that things truly made preserve themselves through time in the first freshness of their nature.’
As with the Brownings, Edwin and Willa Muir were a devoted couple who found harmony in their joined lives and the pursuit of literature. After a life of wandering through Europe, Muir found his spiritual home in 1950 as Warden of Newbattle Abbey College, his students being ‘clerks, fitters, turners, tube-makers, railwaymen, typists, journalists, teachers, civil servants.’ They came mostly for a year, many returning to their work, others winning scholarships, one, a miner with a dissertation on Kant, another, a tube-maker with an essay on Paradise Lost.
Having read at least a dozen autobiographies/memoirs over the past couple of years, I found Muir’s account of his life the most re-readable. Although I had to accept his statement that all his life he had been ‘a Christian without knowing it ,’ I was baffled by his concluding statement that ‘we receive from the past … from the source of the mystery itself, by the means which religious people call Grace.’ But what precisely do we receive? It can only be a sense of the past - which is surely a circular arguement - we receive from the mystery of the past a sense of the past. How else? What else?
Certainly Muir is obsessed with his own past, his love of the friendship found among the people in his childhood homes of Wyre and Garth, of close family ties and the fields and animals he encountered; the awful shock of being uprooted to Glasgow, where he encountered nothing but lies and villainy, rudeness, ugliness and dirt. These urban experiences at a young age never left him and he became a recluse, finding solace in books. He experiences of school are almost terrifying, the terror of seeing children beaten with up to twelve lashings of the tawse, the unpredictabilty and hostility of teachers, and the loss of siblings to diseases of various kinds such as cancer and tuberculosis.
Muir (1887-1959) is probably best known today for his collaboration with his wife Willa in their translations of Franz Kafka or for his critical studies. But of his novels I most enjoyed The Marionette, the story of an idiot boy who cannot face the ‘real’ world until he destroys his precious marionette. The changing relationship between the boy Hans and his father Martin who introduces his son to the terrifying world of real people is both haunting and moving.
May 22, 2014
This book was an excellent read. It is not an easy read. While the author’s life has been interesting it is his careful use of the language and his reflection on his life that makes this autobiography so appealing to me. I read about this book in something Wendell Berry wrote - and I don’t think I would have paid any attention to it otherwise. I’m glad I did pay attention to it. This book - more than almost any other I’ve read made me see his own time period for what it must have seemed and felt like to many people - in the places he lived and the people with whom he dwelt. It was beautifully and thoughtfully rendered.
January 31, 2014
This is still (more than 50 years after it was written) an engrossing account of an extra ordinary life. Not so much to do with external events, more the process of recollection and the significance for Muir as a writer and thinker. There is some recent doubt over whether Muir's account of growing up on an Orkney farm would have been quite as idyllic as he portrays it. In a sense this doesn't really matter: the book is very much concerned with what the intentions are behind writing autobiography. The fable v. the story.
June 16, 2015
An excellent poetic account of a life begun on an Orkney farm and later including time in Prague and Dresden amongst other cities. Muir with his wife provided early and impressive translations of Kafka and wrote some lovely poetry.
August 20, 2008
A neglected classic from the 20th century Scottish poet and translator of Kafka. Deserves to be reissued. Perhaps NYRB will add it to their list...?
May 5, 2008
I could do without the Viennese / psychotherapy interlude, but the opening chapters on growing up lonely in the Orkney Islands made me woozy with delight.
December 18, 2020
A wonderful and beautifully crafted evocation of childhood. The idyllic first part set in the Orkney Islands is starkly contrasted with the urban sequel in Glasgow.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews