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Mick Imlah arrived at the TLS in 1992 and continued working there, eventually in dire circumstances, until his death in January 2009. The office, for Mick, as he indicated more than once, in his native taciturn way, was an area of stability. It was also the place, strange though it may be to contemplate, where his Scottish personality was able to emerge, finally to take control of his writing, and his tongue.

In three successive offices, over ten years, Mick and I sat next to one another, within touching distance, and at various times we both liked to do what he called ‘the Sunday shift’. I would be sifting through magazines and books in preparation for writing my column the next day; Mick attended to a variety of things—a review, if he had been commissioned to write one; a proposal for a novel (it didn’t get far); and in later years the poems of The Lost Leader, which—it would have required a deliberate effort not to notice— flashed up on his screen with increasing frequency.

The social style of these Sunday encounters was primitive, and typical of our friendship. I was usually in the otherwise deserted office by lunchtime. At around two, I would be conscious of another presence settling down nearby.

‘Mick…’

‘Jim…’

Little else would be said until one or the other got ready to leave.

‘Tomorrow, then?’

‘Tomorrow.’

As an editor, Mick handled a variety of subjects: archaeology, Ireland, literature in general, with particular responsibility for selecting poems and organizing reviews of new poetry books. He was also industrious as a sub-editor, both of articles he had commissioned himself and of those fetched in by others. Anyone who has been in such a situation, in which six or seven reviews pass under the hovering pencil in the course of a day, knows that a basic ‘pass’ will have to be enough in many cases.

‘Want to have a look at this?’

‘Any good?’

A pause. A dropped shoulder. ‘It’s okay.’ If he met my eyes while saying it, instinct would suggest it was less than okay. There were degrees of recommendation, from ‘problematical’ to ‘getting there’ to ‘verging on the usable’.

At about 6 o’clock, he would stuff books and other materials into his satchel and put on his coat.

‘Tomorrow, then?’

‘If we’re spared.’

For the last six or seven years of Mick’s life at the TLS, no departure was made without the utterance of ‘If we’re spared’—possibly several times as he negotiated his way to the door past other colleagues. Later, ‘If we’re spared’ would come first, without the preliminary ‘Good night’. In the end, it was just

‘…spared.’

‘Spared.’

The joke (it seemed like a joke at the time) was a Scottish one, passed down from another colleague’s Dundonian grandmother. Mick and I were sometimes referred to, together with the fiction editor Lindsay Duguid, who completed our triangular coven, as ‘the Scottish island’ (in Lindsay’s case the description was more ancestral).

My origins were obvious from the moment I opened my mouth, at least in the early part of my life at the TLS, but the same did not go for Mick. The attribute which now seems central to his writing, both in poetry and prose, was scarcely in evidence. He did not present himself as Scottish, nor make claims to it, as most Scots who end up in foreign lands do. The long poem in his first book, ‘Goldilocks’, which tangles alarmingly with the bogeymen of identity and nationality, is something of an exception. From about the time he started editing the Penguin Book of Scottish Verse with Robert Crawford, however (the book was published in 2000), his cultural patriotism increased year by year. The trips north, often to stay at the house in Ayrshire of his close friend Jane Wellesley, became more frequent, sometimes monthly. What his colleagues didn’t realize at first was that these visits were field trips, part of a project: the reconstitution of the Scottish boy. On meeting Mick’s parents for the first time, I was amused to learn that they knew him as ‘Mike’—a commoner contraction in Scotland than ‘Mick’. Only now have I recalled that I sometimes referred to him directly as Mike myself, possibly in a subconscious attempt to get the ball past him, as we would say in a different context.

Early on, Mick appeared to me as a not untypical Oxford graduate, with mainly Oxbridge friends. One of his girlfriends once appealed for information about Glasgow, on his behalf (though I’m sure without his permission), in preparation for a trip up north. It came as a surprise to learn that he had been raised in the same city as me—he had never said so, and it hadn’t occurred to me. In literature, he was identified with Kipling, Browning, Tennyson, and the poets of the First World War. The great body of Scottish poetry, which charged into the twentieth century with Hugh MacDiarmid and is still breathing in the frame of Edwin Morgan, was scarcely mentioned, as far as I recall, before the mid-1990s.

In the twenty years between Birthmarks and The Lost Leader, Mick published relatively few poems—fewer by the year, or so it seemed (the August 11, 2000, issue of the TLS carried ‘Stephen Boyd’, one of the earliest of the poems which make up The Lost Leader to appear in print). Correspondingly, he became a prolific writer of reviews on Scottish subjects for the TLS. It was through these that he explored his thoughts and feelings about the nation’s literature, and, by the same shift in attention, his personal history. The excavations which resulted in the poems of his remarkable second book began at his desk in Wapping.

Mick’s working practices were often frustrating. Picture it like this: A book arrives in the post—say, a new collection of John Buchan stories featuring Sir Edward Leithen, Buchan’s ‘other hero’ beside Richard Hannay. It fell to me to commission most reviews of books on Scottish themes, and this one I would place on Mick’s desk. The occasion for such a piece, if I could tempt him, would be the ‘Scotland’ issue, which the TLS used to publish each summer at the time of the Edinburgh Festival. For this, I would draw up a list of commissioned articles, which in due course would be passed to the editor in time for making up the issue. In Mick’s case, I would expect him to write about 2,500 words—what we refer to among ourselves as ‘a page’.

‘Interested in the Buchan?’

The said Buchan would be fingered, turned from front to back, contents inspected. A few disparaging comments about the paper or print. Finally, a signal of affirmation.

‘A page?’

At this stage, it would seem appropriate to introduce a note of professionalism into the proceedings.

‘When for?’

Calendar would be consulted. ‘August 10 issue. So…end of July?’

A pursed mouth was enough to indicate that the job was in hand.

The Leithen Stories by John Buchan, with an introduction by Christopher Harvie, published by Canongate, is now in Mick’s West London flat. A page has been reserved for it in the ‘Scotland’ issue. Nothing more has been said about it since the original conversation, which might have taken place six months earlier. Press day at the TLS is Tuesday. Pieces are usually submitted for editing at least two weeks before the due issue date. But in the production of copy, as in many areas of life, Mick was answerable exclusively to a set of laws that were, and remain, evasive of scrutiny. It is now one o’clock on press-day afternoon, and there is a blank page where there ought to be a review of The Leithen Stories. By this time, occupied with my own column and overseeing Hugo Williams’s Freelance, I am luxuriating in the knowledge that it is no longer my responsibility. The deputy editor comes out of his office.

‘Has anybody seen Mick?’

Looks are exchanged. ‘I think he’s gone to Scotland.’

Restrained incredulity. ‘Did he say anything about his review?’

Nobody knows. In time, it is deduced that, no, he did not say anything about his review. ‘Have we got anything we could put in its place?’ No, we haven’t; not of the right kind.

Then, somehow, by a process still not clear to me, the review materializes—possibly in Mick’s jacket pocket, in the form of a galley which he had made up himself on a Sunday shift—as he himself materializes in mid-afternoon, spirited perhaps from Scotland, perhaps not, but steadfastly unapologetic, unharassed, unassailable.

The review of The Leithen Stories appeared in the TLS according to schedule, one of a series of brilliant essays by Mick on Scottish writing. The current favourites—Burns, Hogg, Stevenson, MacDiarmid—he left to others. His sense of being himself an outsider drew him towards the less fashionable fraternity: Sir Walter Scott, S. R. Crockett, J. M. Barrie, Edwin Muir, Buchan. These pieces and others, on for example a group of largely unread Glasgow novelists of the mid-twentieth century, could have been developed into a book. More than once, I suggested, in the familiar half-coded way, that he might turn his mind to the task. I have forgotten how he replied, or even if he did reply beyond a dropped shoulder or a three-beat pause followed by a humorous or cutting remark.

This is not the same as saying that I have only a vague memory of working next to Mick. What we remember, as Derek Walcott wrote in an essay about his friendship with Robert Lowell, are ‘gestures’—gestures and impressions, which somehow succeed in being more faithful to character than recorded conversations. My impression of Mick’s conversion to his own Scottish nature was complete by the time of his death. I don’t wish to suggest that his adopted, Oxford-London self was any less real; only that my feeling was that he had made it secondary in importance, having constructed a cultural shelter over his head.

Back in the office from Edinburgh on a Monday morning.

‘Jim…’

‘Mick.’

‘Alastair was asking for you.’

‘Oh yes? How did you like him?’

‘He’s okay.’