The polarising poet, sculptor and ‘avant-gardener’ who maintained a private militia

Not many artists engage in the maintenance of a private militia, and it seems fair to assume that those who do may be bound to polarise. The Scottish poet, sculptor, ‘avant-gardener’ and would-be revolutionary Ian Hamilton Finlay was just such a figure: and boy, did he polarise. To his fans, he is a cult figure in the true sense, a limitlessly inventive visionary whose Lanarkshire home and garden remain a site of pilgrimage. To his detractors – notably, a number of vocal Finlay-bashers in the English press – he was a crank, a provincial megalomaniac possessed of artistic, literary and dictatorial pretensions quite out of proportion to his ability. These were opinions you voiced at your peril: anyone who dared ridicule, misrepresent or merely misunderstand Finlay in print ran the risk of being ‘visited’ by his heavies, the so-called ‘Saint-Just Vigilantes’ – ‘a band of impressionable Scots art yobs … sent to terrorise others and defend his honour’, according to the critic Waldemar Januszczak, one of many naysayers who upset the artist. (And yes: he was among those who received a knock on the door.)

It’s not entirely clear whether the self-styled ‘vigilantes’ did anything more menacing than vandalise an office (that of The Spectator’s sister magazine, Apollo, when the late Brian Sewell published a vicious hatchet job in its pages in 1989); nor as to whether the otherwise agoraphobic Finlay himself was interested in anything other than the notoriety such stunts might generate. If so, he might well have shot himself in the practically shod foot: the habitual adjectives ascribed to him whenever his name appears in the press seem to be ‘prickly’, ‘difficult’, and most of all, ‘cantankerous’. Small wonder. Finlay actively cultivated enemies where it suited him and fell out with almost everyone: with his best man, the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, over some perceived slight or other; with the French government, for cancelling a planned commission; and, most famously – we’ll come back to this – the Great Satan that was Strathclyde council.