BIOGRAPHY: The Bard: Robert Burns – A BiographyBy Robert Crawford Jonathan Cape, 466pp. £20
ROBERT BURNS is a poet who convinces his readers they have embarked on something like a personal relationship with him.
“Robert Burns belonged to me,” wrote Maya Angelou of her experiences of reading Burns in the American south. Perhaps Burns was “brought back as a baby from China by some Scottish missionary named Burns”, the Chinese artist Chiang Yee suggested to Robert Crawford. Burns the Scotsman has always also been Burns the citizen of the world.
The young Burns’s personality was shaped by poverty, in the form of his father’s endless debts, and boundless belief in self-advancement, a belief borne out by the vibrancy of the sacred and secular culture all around him. The poetry of Alexander Pope was a strong early influence. The word “improving” has a unique resonance in Scottish culture, as exemplified for Burns by his early teacher, the enlightened clergyman William Dalrymple, who offered him an exemplar against the sanctimony and intolerance he would later denounce in Holy Willie’s Prayer. Obscure country parishes, Crawford reminds us, could be no less theatres of the Scottish enlightenment than Edinburgh coffee houses or the cloisters of St Andrews. As a young man it was not uncommon for Burns to attend several sermons on Sunday and adjourn to the inn in the intervals, in a fragile synthesis of sacred and profane as touching as it was to be short-lived.
The effort of sustaining his contradictions showed in more ways than Burns’s attitude to religion. Analysing the failure of a flax-dressing scheme he invested in, Crawford argues that Burns suffered a mental breakdown, and may have been not just a depressive but bipolar. If so, a lifetime of energetic love affairs offered ample distraction. Burns warned the “Mauchline belles” to “beware a tongue that’s smoothly hung”, but even his warnings sound like come-ons. A child born out of wedlock by Elizabeth Paton led to Burns doing public penance in the “cutty stool” for fornication. The kirk elders were rewarded for their trouble with the biting satire of The Holy Tulzie. Burns the public “bardie” had come through a defining rite of passage.
Burns’s politics too defined him from the off. The child of a revolutionary age, the Jacobite in him did not have far to look for incentives to radicalism.
Unlike those later ploughman poets John Clare and Patrick Kavanagh, he enjoyed the patronage of a powerful vested interest in the Freemasons, a connection that helped get his first book into print.
Burns was highly self-conscious about the figure he might cut in the literary marketplace, and the commonplace books he kept in his 20s are full of self-portraits that are really blurbs by another name (“it may be some entertainment to a curious observer of human nature to see how a plough-man thinks”). Publication led to a period of being “gawped at” in Edinburgh, after which a posting in the excise service took him to Dumfries, where he died, aged 37, in 1796.
Keeping track of Burns’s amours is quite a task, it has to be said. He fathered a child by a barmaid, which his long-suffering wife agreed to bring up, and pursued Agnes McLehose (“Clarinda”) for many years. An incredible letter to his friend Robert Ainslie on the importance of bowing to his “Horn of Plenty”, a letter the poet’s admirers tried to destroy after his death, exposes his inner phallocrat in highly unflattering terms.
Equally unsettling was his desire to emigrate to Jamaica in 1786, where this friend of liberty would have become a tool of the slave trade (the sudden upturn in his fortunes after the publication of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, meant the plan came to nothing). Crawford is unjudgemental on these subjects, seeing Burns’s political failings as a reminder of how wedded Scotland was to the larger imperial culture of the time.
At 400-odd pages, Crawford’s life manages to be exhaustive rather than exhausting. Don Paterson warned him that another biography of Burns would be “the world’s least necessary book”, but for all the plethora of competing biographies and studies there is no danger of the dust settling on the Burns canon just yet. The Canongate Burns of 2001 claimed to have identified a cache of long-lost poems, but coming on top of that edition’s myriad howlers the boast was met by the kind of scholarly firestorm rarely seen since Hans Walter-Gabler’s “Corrected Text” of Ulysses. Even as I write this review, there is news of some recently unearthed letters in which Burns complains of a dose of the clap, which prevents him from riding his horse, and grumbles about those “bastards”, his children.
“You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence”, Yeats wrote shortly before his death. Anyone who has come through an English degree will be familiar with the modes of reading represented by William Empson on ambiguity in Donne, or George Steiner in agonies over the unspeakable complexity of Paul Celan, but there is something in the frank nakedness of a Burns poem that blind-sides familiar patterns of academic response, not that he is without complexities of his own. But how many other major poets lend themselves to being sung in the shower? And how many poets combine such simplicity with the pathos and heartbreak of the song on which Crawford ends?
O my Luve’s like a red, red rose,
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my Luve’s like the melodie
That’s sweetly played in tune.
As fair art thou, my bonie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will love thee still, my Dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.
David Wheatley is a poet and critic