ABSTRACT
Widely reported by the media, this contretemps occurred during the "Scottish Writing Today" session, when Trocchi called MacDiarmid "an old fossil" and received the epithet "cosmopolitan scum" in return. Tracing the lines of descent from the American Beats to the subaltern Scots of the 1990s might initially seem an easy enough task. The 1962 conference was a landmark event not only because of its scope, but also because of the notorious verbal clash between the young Scottish novelist Alexander Trocchi and the kilted patriarch of Scottish poetry Hugh MacDiarmid. The idealized depiction of Scottish life associated with the Kailyard School led to the term accruing strongly pejorative associations, and indeed MacDiarmid's modernist fashioning of Synthetic Scots was a strong rejection of its sanitized sentimentality. Trocchi grandiosely claimed that he himself had written the only interesting Scottish literature in twenty years and that the significant issues, such as identity, were "being discussed by young American writers, and young French writers".
