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His distaste for practical anatomy, however, eventually led him to abandon the medical course at Edinburgh, and to move to Oxford to study at Oriel College before returning to Edinburgh. Sorley MacLean married in 1946, and after his marriage he and his wife, Renee, became close friends with Sydney Goodsir Smith and his wife, both families sharing a house in Craigmillar Park for about eighteen months, before the MacLeans then moved to Atholl Place. This period is written about in Goodsir Smith’s Under the Eildon Tree (1948). During this time Sorley MacLean entered actively into the literary life of Edinburgh, and he saw a lot of Sidney Goodsir Smith. J. B. Caird recollects how whenever he saw Sorley MacLean during this period, he was full of amusing stories about his fellow poet, ‘The Auk’, as he was known, and he comments on how Goodsir Smith’s unconventional ways and witty conversation intrigued Sorley MacLean. Goodsir Smith’s first book was Skail Wind (1941), and he also published Carotid Cornucopius about life in Edinburgh in 1947.
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