A message from Alex Salmond, First Minister of Scotland, on the website of the
“Robert Burns World Federation” describes Burns as his country’s “national
poet and cultural icon”, and places him on a list of “Scotland’s great
contributions to the world” alongside golf, whisky and the Enlightenment.
Although it does not deal directly with Burns’s “afterlives”, part of the
energy of The Bard, Robert Crawford’s brisk and immensely readable new
biography of the poet, is unquestionably directed against this kind of crass
appropriation of Burns by the Scottish heritage industry. For Crawford,
Burns’s primary affiliations are with a very different Scotland: raucous,
radical, defiant and unapologetic about its occasional episodes of
Bacchanalian revelry. Burns’s best poetry bristles with the acerbic wit and
life of the community in which he grew up, and to which he remained
emotionally and culturally attached during his years of fame.
Crawford’s carefully researched account of the world of Burns’s childhood and
youth highlights the competing forces that helped to shape the mature poet.
His father, William Burnes (sic), was “on the side of the improvers”; a
serious, God-fearing man, keen to give his sons as good an education as
circumstances would allow. Burns has left what is widely acknowledged to be
an idealized portrait of his father in “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” – an
uncharacteristically sentimental performance, which provided the nineteenth
century with a reassuring image of respectable and devout poverty. It was
through this “improving” element in his upbringing that Burns came into
contact with English literary models that influenced the future direction of
his poetry. Burns has often been placed within a purely Scottish literary
framework; but Crawford traces echoes of the work of Pope, Shenstone and
other English poets in his poetry. Through his mother, by contrast, Burns
acquired his connection to the living tradition of folk tale and song which
became one of his chief inspirations. Some of the problems of attribution
which continue to bedevil Burns scholarship derive from the depth of his
identification with this tradition; in later life he collected and adapted
many of these songs for his own purposes, blurring the boundary between
transmission and original composition.
When they move outside the Burns household, these early chapters depict a
social world dominated by an oppressive but artfully resisted religiosity.
The Kirk claimed the authority to regulate individual morality, but its
strictures existed in a kind of incongruous symbiosis with the periodic
indulgence of repressed and forbidden appetites. Burns’s great poem “The
Holy Fair” provides a vivid portrait of this bizarre mixture of sermonizing
and heavy drinking, of hell-fire preaching and “houghmagandie”:
How monie hearts this day converts,
O’ sinners and o’ Lasses!
Their hearts o’ stane, gin night are gane,
As saft as ony flesh is.
There’s some are fou’ o’ love divine;
There’s some are fou’ o’ brandy;
An’ monie jobs that day begin,
May end in Houghmagandie
Some ither day.
Eighteenth-century Scots was clearly a language rich in synonyms for this last
pastime, and Burns makes use of most of them in his poetry. Even after his
marriage to the long-suffering Jean Armour, he continued to take advantage
of the numerous opportunities for sexual conquest opened up by his personal
charm and powers of persuasion.
Although Burns was a poet who was forced to earn his living by means of
agricultural labour for much of his life, the Ayrshire communities in which
he lived were not entirely deprived of contact with the currents of thought
emanating from Edinburgh, the centre of the Scottish Enlightenment. Crawford
lists the many formal and informal social networks promoting the development
of individual culture and literary activity to which Burns belonged. Through
his membership of the Freemasons, his participation in the Tarbolton
“Bachelors Club”, and his friendship with like-minded people of his own
class and background, he found ready support and assistance for his earliest
poetic efforts, and encouragement for his desire to have his songs and poems
published. It was not a wealthy patron, but his Irvine friend Richard Brown
who first suggested that he send his verses to a magazine for publication.
Such networks enabled Burns to develop and sustain a sense of the value of
his literary output independent of that placed on it by the wealthy
supporters who drifted into and out of his life. Unlike John Clare, he was
not reduced to debilitating social and intellectual isolation by the
withdrawal of patronage.
Not that Burns was unaware of the value of patronage, or unwilling to
cultivate it. Some of the verse addressed to his patrons struggles to stay
on the right side of sycophancy, as Crawford acknowledges; but the most
remarkable thing about Burns’s dealings with his patrons was his poise and
assurance among them. This quality disconcerted some, like the philosopher
Dugald Stewart, who remarked that Burns had a “dread of anything approaching
to meanness or servility” which “rendered his manner somewhat decided and
hard” in such company. Burns’s demeanour on these occasions was prompted, in
part at least, by his shrewd appreciation of the reasons for the public
interest in him. He knew that he was, for some of his supporters, an exotic
specimen to be exhibited, proof that a “mute inglorious Milton” really could
be found behind a plough. In fact, he exploited this image, aware of its
currency and marketability; it was, as he put it, “part of the machinery of
his poetical character” to pass for “an illiterate ploughman who wrote from
pure inspiration” on occasion. But this acquiescence in the role scripted
for him by the culture was almost invariably accompanied by subversive
elements. As well as being the “Bard”, he was also that character’s Scots
alter ego, the “bardie”, an irreverent, outspoken champion of the common
man.
Crawford’s chapter on Burns’s momentous first visit to Edinburgh, undertaken
in the wake of the success of his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect
(1786), is wittily titled “New World’. (Not all of the terse chapter
headings are equally successful; it requires careful scrutiny to discern the
logic of “Rhinoceros”, for instance.) This title refers both to the novelty
of the boisterous, crowded, rapidly “improving” city into which he was
thrust by his new-found fame, and to the fate that his literary success had
enabled him to avoid. Before the publication of Poems, he had more or less
decided to go to the West Indies – almost certainly to work as one of the
detested “overseers” charged with extracting maximum value from the slaves.
It is difficult to reconcile this intention with the work of a poet famed
for his assertions of human equality and pointed defiance of the claims of
monarchy and aristocracy, but this narrow escape serves as a stark reminder
of the moral compromises forced on people in Burns’s social position by the
overriding need to make a living. His later employment as an exciseman, a
“gauger”, is a similar instance, aligning him with people who appear in his
early poetry as enemies of the poor. It was clearly possible for Burns to be
an exciseman while continuing to side imaginatively with those who lived by
attempting to outwit him, just as it was possible for the Burns who
contemplated plantation life to write “The Slave’s Lament”. The negotiation
of such contradictions is one of the severest tests imposed on the
working-class writer.
While in Edinburgh, Burns wrote several poems commemorating the life and work
of the recently deceased Robert Fergusson, his immediate precursor in the
art of Scots poetry and song. Both Fergusson and Allan Ramsay provided him
with validating examples of a vernacular poetry which drew on rather than
apologized for the strength, energy and occasional ferocity of everyday
speech. Burns also found in this Scots language tradition his characteristic
stanza, the “Standard Habbie”, the shorter fourth and sixth lines of which
provide the perfect vehicle for his ruminative asides and biting comments.
Some of Burns's early Scottish and English readers unquestionably regretted
his use of what they regarded as a semi-barbarous dialect. It is worth
remembering that Burns’s language was as remote from many of his Edinburgh
readers, with their “improved" manners and speech, as it was from his London
audience; his work has needed a glossary from the first moment of its
publication. The use of Scots was, though, a gesture of solidarity with an
idea of Scotland rapidly fading in a country increasingly conceived of as
part of a larger, imperial whole; and it is when Burns’s poetry makes
contact with the everyday speech of his contemporaries that it comes to
life. His forays into the bland and formulaic poetic diction of Augustan
English serve as a kind of foil against which the demotic passages shine all
the more brightly. In the “Address to the Deil”, for instance, the poet’s
confession of his own sins is followed by an assertion that he might yet
escape the Devil’s clutches: “But faith! He’ll turn a corner jinkan / And
cheat you yet”. This “jink” or sudden change of direction is the last
resource of the desperate fugitive, the weak man’s chance to outsmart and
outmanoeuvre the strong; it is a word that encodes a social history. It was
Wordsworth, some fifteen years later, who stated that poetry should use “a
selection of the language really used by men”; but it was Burns who
succeeded in this aim more thoroughly and consistently than his English
successor. Placed alongside Burns's vernacular verse, with its roots deep in
the life of his community, many of Wordsworth’s efforts look like anaemic,
academic exercises.
The French Revolution made the kind of political attitudes implicit in much of
Burns’s poetry suddenly appear dangerous. In more relaxed times, he could
include in his collections the astonishingly forthright poem “A Dream”, in
which “his Bardship” subjects the personal lives and loves of members of the
royal household to robust and unflattering scrutiny. By the early 1790s,
however, his superiors at the Dumfries Excise Board were beginning to
question his loyalty to King and Country. Burns's responses to their
inquiries – professions of loyalty to “the British Constitution”, membership
of the Royal Dumfries Volunteers – are interpreted by Crawford as the result
of anxieties about his livelihood, rather than evidence of a genuine shift
away from his earlier democratic and radical political principles. Crawford
argues that these official gestures were accompanied by sly acts of
defiance. Both “Scots Wha Hae wi’ Wallace Bled” and, more tenuously, “Auld
Lang Syne” are seen as poems fusing Jacobinism and Jacobitism, drawing on a
tradition of Scottish nationalism with disruptive and subversive potential
in an era of political reaction. Crawford’s arguments for Burns’s continued
adherence to these core beliefs are persuasive, but, in a sense,
unnecessary. It is simply alien to the whole tenor of Burns’s poetry, with
its direct engagement with the pleasures and pains of ordinary people, to
think of him as an apologist for the monarchy and the “British
Constitution”. The doubts about the authenticity of many of the poems and
songs attributed to him represent an additional proof of the strength of his
connection with the imaginative life of the people. Like the French
songwriter Pierre-Jean de Béranger, a poet whom he resembles in many ways,
and with whom he was often compared in the nineteenth century, Burns
attracted imitators because he articulated with unique clarity strong but
largely unvoiced feelings of social solidarity and national pride in adverse
political circumstances.
Crawford’s determination to exonerate Burns from the charge of political
apostasy gives an apologetic and even defensive tone to some sections of The
Bard. This defensiveness is also apparent in the sections dealing with
Burns’s less than exemplary moral conduct. While conducting an extended
epistolary romance with the married Agnes McLehose – playing “Sylvander” to
her “Clarinda” – Burns had a less literary relationship with one of her
servants, Jenny Clow, leaving her pregnant. Crawford describes his conduct
in such cases as “disgraceful”, but feels compelled to reassure us that
“Burns felt deeply for his children” in spite of occasional evidence to the
contrary. Such moments, in which the author attempts to protect the image of
Burns from the consequences of his own findings, are symptomatic of a muted
but perceptible nationalist agenda at work throughout The Bard. This also
manifests itself in persistent origin-marking of individuals (“Scots-born”)
and the use of awkward pre-modified noun phrases (“Fénelon’s secretary
Ayr-born Jacobite Andrew Ramsay”) to highlight Scotland’s “contribution” to
British and world culture of the period.
The Bard is published simultaneously with The Best-Laid Schemes, a selection
of Burns’s poetry and prose, co-edited by Crawford and Christopher
MacLachlan (Polygon, £12.99). The principles underlying this selection have
clearly been dictated by the reading of Burns’s life and work set out in The
Bard. Many of the poems on which Crawford bases his assertions about the
poet’s political stance, such as the fragment “When Guilford Good our Pilot
Stood”, are included; and the bawdy, even coarse element of Burns’s output
is strongly represented, in poems with titles like “Why Should Na Poor
People Mow” – ie, engage in houghmagandie – and the self-explanatory “Nine
Inch Will Please A Lady”. A few poems “rediscovered” by Crawford in the
course of his research are included, with an explanation of their
provenance, but the selection as a whole is firmly based on Burns’s
best-known work, and aimed primarily at the general reader rather than the
scholar.
In The Bard, too, Crawford unearths material unknown to previous scholars,
most notably a lengthy journal entry by the Rev James Macdonald which
contains “the last extended account of [Burns’s] conversation” written
during the poet’s lifetime. Crawford’s desire to produce a narrative
accessible to the general reader leads him to confine some of the details of
these discoveries, and most of the rest of his formidable scholarship, to
the notes. He is, however, severe on the shortcomings of a number of his
predecessors, especially in the introduction, which has a kind of Burnsian
pugnacity about it. Don Paterson is praised for his “brilliantly written”
and “insightful” overview of the poet’s work, but then accused of attempting
“to neuter Burns’s political, and even some of his erotic, power”. James
Mackay’s “prizewinning tome” of 1992 is “clogged with facts”, “stodgily
written” and, finally, “unreadable”.
Although an academic himself, Crawford attempts to escape what he calls the
“conformist pedagogy” apparent in most academic studies of Burns, an
approach which waters down the very quality – the poet’s radical,
subversive, dissenting energy – that Crawford prizes above all. His desire
to liberate Burns from the clutches of the professors forces Crawford
outside the library and back to the places in which Burns lived and worked.
(In view of this legitimate and illuminating attention to the importance of
place in Burns’s poetry, it is surprising that The Bard lacks
illustrations.) The resulting reportage provides some memorable glimpses of
modern Scottish life. Tarbolton Masons, Burns’s lodge, now runs a social
club “offering bingo evenings and football on satellite television”;
and the author’s fact-finding mission to Dumfries is enlivened by the
appearance of a youth who “staggered by, shouting ‘Ah’ll kill ’em! I’ll
fuckin stab ’em!’”. Crawford’s inclusion of these scenes represents an
implicit challenge to those who wish to reduce Burns to the
two-dimensionality of a cultural icon. By hinting at continuities between
modern Scotland and the world Burns describes – the world of Tam o’ Shanter,
getting “fou” with his cronies and enjoying a momentary triumph over “the
ills o’ life” – Crawford implicitly liberates the poet from his place in the
museum of Scotland, and suggests that his work has the power to become once
again a vital presence in the life of the people.
Robert Crawford
THE BARD
Robert Burns, a biography
466pp. Cape. £20.
978 0 224 07768 2
Joe Phelan is a Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature at De Montfort
University. He is the co-editor of The Poems of Browning, the third volume
of which was published in 2007.
