A Night Out with Burns Read online

Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!

  Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble,

  But house or hald,

  To thole the Winter’s sleety dribble,

  An’ cranreuch cauld!

  But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,

  In proving foresight may be vain:

  The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men,

  Gang aft agley,

  An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

  For promis’d joy!

  Still, thou art blest, compared wi’ me!

  The present only toucheth thee:

  But Och! I backward cast my e’e,

  On prospects drear!

  An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,

  I guess an’ fear!

  Burns was a satirist of the first water. No religious piety, no political hypocrisy, no brand of inhumanity or inequality, no cheerless idiocy or tactless ambition – even those he could claim as his own – remained as it had been after the best of his poetry. But these are qualities that exceptional people might have, that artists might deploy to the clamour of fame, and though it is very unusual for one person to carry so much newness in themselves, so much variety, and so to embody a tradition as well, it is not unprecedented. Even in that century of his – the century so derided by Carlyle, over which Burns was seen to stride like a colossus – several great persons stood in the way of Robert Burns’s claim to the prize. So his genius alone will not explain the extent of his marketability, the sheer number and variety of mugs and tea-towels on which his face appears.

  It may be that Burns’s sort of fame (his sort of usefulness) depends on selective memory, on selective understanding, and certainly on selective reading. He is the dream advertising tool not because of his localness, or because he is sexually and politically explosive, or because he is difficult and strange, but because he is pure and direct. He is the ideal marketing tool because he can be all of these things, while seeming to be nothing too particular. Burns can seem to be universal. He can seem a pure lover, a pure worker, a pure patriot, a pure loyalist, a pure man of nature wherever it may occur. He can seem to mean nothing, and only to feel. He knew this himself: it could, in fact, be argued that it was Burns who began the process of turning himself into an ‘easy listening’ poet. He knew that a selective rendering of his life, his habits and his work would do him no harm with the well-to-do. The poems stood for themselves, but Burns gave us hints about how to appreciate him, and make use of him, without having to deal with the troublesome edge of many of his poems, letters and songs. He hid himself especially well. Those songs might sound an antique note of beauty, but many of them also make a political noise. The memory of Culloden may be a hammerless bell now, but in 1790, when Burns ‘discovered’ the following air, it had more of the character of an alarm:

  By yon castle wa’ at the close of the day,

  I heard a man sing tho’ his head it was grey;

  And as he was singing, the tears down came,

  There’ll never be peace till Jamie comes hame.—

  The Church is in ruins, the State is in jars,

  Delusions, oppressions, and murderous wars:

  We dare na weel say’t, but we ken wha’s to blame,

  There’ll never be peace till Jamie comes hame.—

  My seven braw sons for Jamie drew sword,

  And now I greet round their green beds in the yerd;

  It brak the sweet heart of my faithfu’ auld Dame,

  There’ll never be peace till Jamie comes hame.—

  Now life is a burden that bows me down,

  Sin I tint my bairns, and he tint his crown;

  But till my last moments my words are the same,

  There’ll never be peace till Jamie comes hame.—

  He framed himself as a rustic, a loveable rogue, a universal singer of nature, a blithe and unspecific defender of human rights. We can see why he did it – for preferment and an easier life – and we might love him nonetheless. But it may draw us closer to our question, if not yet to our answer: why is Burns so easy to market to the world? Burns has been harnessed now, like no one else, to represent the romantic spirit of the common man, and there are common men the world over who are keen to hear him. He may have been taken out of his time, the bite of his satire may leave no mark, but he is now an icon for strong general feelings, universally understood: he is perpetually at one with the stars, in love with little mice, swelling to the noise of rivers, the flush on a young girl’s cheek, outraged and saddened at poverty. The world – and his own little world of Ayrshire knows the benefits – has followed his own impulse towards self-immortalisation; it has made him somebody by seeing him as nobody; it has sought to make a place for him as a Man of Men, and his signature tune ‘A Man’s a Man for A’That’ has become a sort of ‘Marseillaise’ for the world. ‘Auld Lang Syne’ as ‘Happy Birthday’.

  There are now two classes of people who recognise the name Robert Burns: those who think he has lovely things to say about daisies, and those who seek to bring out the troubled wisdom of his work, to rescue it, and let it do its damage in these damaged times. There are two audiences for Burns: those who wonder about the extent of his sympathy for the French Revolution, and those who want a few bonnie words on a plate to put on their kitchen wall. It is very unusual. These two groups are often at odds over Burns, but they share a powerful set of sentiments about this ghost of a national poet, in that ghost of a nation.

  Burns’s friend David Sillar is buried behind Irvine Old Parish Church. He died long after Burns, who had written about him, and to him, encouraging Sillar’s interest in poetry and the fiddle. Irvine is hard against the Ayrshire coast; Sillar ran a nautical school here in the early 1800s, and was one of the founders of the Irvine Burns Club. Burns’s lines on Sillar hung about the graveyard the Sunday morning I joined the service. There’s some dispute as to whether Burns actually wrote them, but here they are:

  Should a’ be true the prophets tell,

  If I the lines am fit to spell,

  King David mair o’ dirt should smell

  Than Deity,

  And gin there’s sic a place as Hell—

  Look up and see!

  Inside the kirk, light streamed in at the windows. Intimations on the reverse side of the Order of Service told me that ‘the soup lunch scheduled for today has been cancelled’. They also informed me that the speakers at the Women’s Guild meeting on Monday evening would be G. and A. Murray, on the topic of China Restoration. While a great deal has changed around Irvine’s Old Kirk in the last two hundred years – the widening of the harbour and the new trade links associated with that; the more recent building of high flats, shopping malls and all the shapely accoutrements of a New Town – much in this little walled-off churchyard hasn’t changed at all. There are Scottish continuities about the place, and it is visited by people whose faces, whose voices, whose habits too, bear the heavy stamp of ancestors who filled these pews, or ones very like them, though certainly they did so in greater numbers.

  The minister wore a radio microphone. As he fixed it on, I realised how often it had occurred to me that the real difference between the churches of Catholics and those of Protestants – in Scotland at least – lies in their varying attitudes towards sound, colour and smell. The Catholic priest will whisper invitingly to an audience of secret whisperers; the Kirk minister will bellow from the pulpit and look for a raising of voices in song. The priest wears robes of lurid colours, surrounds himself with flowers and coloured marble, and clutches his golden bowls; the minister wears black, and his church is all dark hues. The Catholic chapel is filled with the smell of incense and candle wax, the whiff of corked wine; in the Kirk of Scotland you smell books. For many of us – those now lost to the cares of reformation and orthodoxy – the old battle is not one that draws on the passions so much as the senses.

  Irvine’s minister adjusted his mike again, and stepped down from the pulpit to greet us. This was a service in mem
ory of Robert Burns. The reverend held up a small wooden stool and asked if anybody had one of them at home. He asked what it was for, and a little girl shouted: ‘To sit on when you’re bad.’ She was right. It was a ‘cutty stool’ of the kind used to punish sinners in Burns’s time – in this kirk and in kirks all over Ayrshire – and Burns himself was made to sit on it several times, usually for the sin of fornication. The congregation was asked to repeat the First Commandment over and over: ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ Moving between Scots and standard English, the minister wondered aloud what Burns would say to us now if he were sitting at our side. He’d notice they’d taken the old bridge away, replaced it with a shopping precinct, a ‘tin box’, on either side of which were churches that now stood empty and dilapidated. (He spoke in the ‘voice’ of Burns.) ‘Whit aboot drugs,’ he said, ‘an epidemic that is set to ruin us?’ The minister made his way through the social evils of today, and wound up having Burns say that he’d rather be in his own time, with the rules of his own day, than be stuck here with us now.

  A man stood up in the pulpit to give a reading. He had been my Classics teacher at school. He was greyer now, and he wore the glittering chains that denoted his office: president of the Irvine Burns Club. I’d not known he was a Burns man when I was messing about in his classroom a dozen years before. I couldn’t help wishing I’d listened to him more. In that terrible way you do from time to time, I realised I’d probably got the wrong end of the man; my certainties about everything then had been the fickle and immoderate certainties of a child. He seemed a decent sort of bloke to me now: no authoritarian ogre, no hard case, no wiseacre. Maybe I was getting old already; my sense, as I watched my former teacher speak, was not really of regret or anything like that, but of serenity. He seemed to me just someone with a life of his own, someone with interests that I shared. But the sight of him made me think of a legion of boys and girls I’d run with at school and never seen again, except in the bright colours of memory.

  On that Burns memorial day, my feelings were already swelling with a Burnsian sense of things gone and done, times past, life lived. I felt I’d momentarily come close to the heart of Burns’s appeal: his works are brilliant evocations of time and place – for some, of all times and all places – and he had a genius for helping us to feel sorry for ourselves. I’d come here to think about Burns’s satires on the church, on intolerance, on piety, but, as on many occasions involving this odd national figure, I’d quickly been drawn towards the pathetic, towards things that got me thinking on auld lang syne. As my old teacher came to the end of his reading, and my mental pictures of his former pupils escaped out of the glorious high windows of the kirk, a fiddler struck up ‘John Anderson My Jo’, and I knew I’d arrived in Burns’s duplicitous, delightful, shameful, essential world of golden sentiment:

  John Anderson my jo, John,

  We clamb the hill the gither;

  And mony a canty day, John,

  We’ve had wi’ ane anither:

  Now we maun totter down, John,

  And hand in hand we’ll go;

  And sleep the gither at the foot,

  John Anderson my Jo.

  The year I looked for the story of Burns in the present day, I sat with the scholar Patrick Scott Hogg in a waiting-room attached to the ferry terminal at Stranraer. The snow outside wasn’t a joke any more. It was vicious: the sea was in a roar. I’m sure he wouldn’t care for you to say so, but the most immediately striking thing about Hogg was how much he looked like Robert Burns. When I saw him – and after having felt what I felt about the similar looks of old farmers and old writers with a passion for Burns – I suspected there might be some devil at work. But no: Mr Hogg is clear-eyed and sideboarded, his hair is brown and thick, an inch or so longer and it would be fit to be tied, just like the poet’s. A bank of video games torpedoed and yelped at our backs as we sat talking. I asked him about his mother and father. ‘My father was a fisherman,’ he said. ‘He used to take us in his boat around the cliffs of Galloway. He was a hard, tough old guy, you know, and quite hard on us.’ I wondered if his father had a feeling for poetry. ‘There was a certain amount of suppression there, but my grandfather played the bagpipes; there was always music around us. There was always a family yarn about us being related to James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, but he only had daughters so far as I know. My mother came from a big agricultural family in this area. There was music there too.’

  Scott Hogg’s was one of those childhoods spent trying to find ways to enlarge himself. He read philosophy, and was forever trying to get his hands on books. He went to Stirling University, but he fell out with an academic over some point of interpretation in D.H. Lawrence and left. He said he’d always wanted to be a writer, but he’d never really had the liberty. He’d planned a novel when he was 18, an ambitious thing about the great poets meeting on a mountain, to be called ‘Parnassus Awaiting’. He didn’t get on with it. ‘I’m working on one now,’ he told me. ‘I’d like to do for the area around here, around Galloway, what Lewis Grassic Gibbon did for the Mearns. It’s about independent, stubborn men who have hard lives but are intelligent human beings.’

  His work on Burns came about through his love of where he lives, and his hatred of sentimentality. ‘I’m a single-minded swine,’ he said. Patrick Scott Hogg is one of those men you find around the worlds of Burns – around the worlds of poetry generally – who, for good and decent reasons, want to have their say, and want to speak about common things. He is under the influence of the commoners’ poet par excellence. Scott Hogg had been on the dole for a while, and had a wife and two children. The whole thing seemed to have become a mission for him. ‘I just noticed one day,’ he said, ‘that the common picture of Burns didn’t match the picture I had in my head of what the guy was about. He came from a working background, he had to work his bollocks off. It was a hard, tough life. All that sentimental stuff, to any thinking person, is just a myth. He had a rationalised, holistic view of the moral world. He tried to rationalise his own time – and there’s loads of us who’d like to do the same thing now.’ He had a strong sense that the sting had been taken out of Burns: the political message had been diluted or erased; the power of the poetry and its relevance for modern times had been diminished; and the annual celebrations of Burns had become pantomimic.

  He decided to write a book called ‘The Patriot Bard’, and it was during his research, as he looked through numbers of the Morning Chronicle and other radical papers of the 1790s, that he found what he believes are previously unattributed poems by Burns. The poems I’ve seen are more or less bad, but Burns is not famous for never having written a bad poem. They are certainly radical. Burns’s politics are all over the place: he could support the French Revolution, but also rewrite Jacobite songs about the restoration of the Stuart king. He could join in songs and slanders against the Hanoverians while working as a civil servant and writing letters to his superiors saluting all that was Britishly royalist, though probably he did this for fear of his livelihood. But the sentiments of the new poems are not beyond him; nor is their lack of felicity. It has long been known that he had a connection with the paper, and he promised them stuff if a safe conduit could be established. One writer about Burns, Dr Andrew Noble, has made a persuasive point: ‘Even if the poems are not by Robert Burns – and there are good reasons to think they might be – then they are by a very interesting, brilliant individual, writing potentially seditious material, in imitation of Burns, at a time when Burns was known to be working for the Excise. Burns was a civil servant. He could have been executed for treason if these poems were found to be his. It has incredible implications for our understanding of Burns, or for the literary and political culture of Scotland at the close of the 18th century, or perhaps for both.’ Patrick Scott Hogg leaned across the Formica: ‘These people who just want to keep Burns cosy,’ he said, ‘they are his jailers. They have political reasons of their own for trying to keep him safe and harmless and sentimenta
l.’

  The Kilwinning Mother Lodge (No. 0) was having its Burns Supper a few weeks later. All present and former members of the club – including Alexander Boswell, who eventually lost his life in a duel – have taken pride in the notion that this was the first Masonic lodge in Scotland, a fact that is the cause of no little argument among those who are happy to describe themselves, as Burns was, as members of the fellowship. The Mother Lodge is tucked under the tower of the old abbey, about halfway down the now pedestrianised Main Street. I grew up in Kilwinning. I used to walk past this elegant building as a boy, and I always wondered what it was for. I was really much more intrigued than frightened, and for all it looked out of bounds, I hoped that I might one day get inside, the way I hoped they’d eventually let me into all the buildings that were meant for adults. The committee had asked me to come and give the ‘Address to Kilwinning’ at their Bicentennial Burns Supper. I booked the train right away, and put on my long trousers.

  People who go to social clubs are always punctual. They formed a line outside, waiting for the doors to open. The members of the committee, and those due to speak, first went to the men-only bar downstairs. There were whiskies going round at speed, and I got into conversation with a jolly guy who liked the idea that I’d recently been to some of the snowed-over farms in south Ayrshire. He started telling me that he’d done farmwork from the age of twelve or thirteen, how hard it was, how badly paid. The man with the bagpipes was practising in the club’s museum. We got into a line ourselves before long – according to where we’d be sitting at the top table – and off we went, the piper at the front, up the stairs and into a room full of clapping people. I felt I needed a drink, but before I could feel it again every tumbler on the table was full. My mother sat across the room; she looked nice, having a good time with her friends. She waved over conspiratorially. I had a feeling she’d somehow got me into this.

  Just about everybody there spoke in the accent Burns would have spoken in. The poetry just tripped out of them, the songs turned over in their mouths like soft potatoes. The president cheered them along with his comical words. All the struggles and arguments and worries to do with Burns were not to be noticed here; this was a celebration of wit and sentiment, of sociability, and the humour of the poems never felt more familiar. The lines of ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ and ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ were performed by a man with one of those very Burnsian faces, very Burnsian tongues, and extremely Burnsian names – Bill Dunlop.