An offal lot of fuss about our favourite playboy
IONCE attended a Burns supper in America where whiskey flowed rather than whisky. And since livestock lungs are banned by the US Department of Agriculture, the Address to a Haggis was conducted over a shepherd’s pie ‘with all the fixings’, followed by a sherry trifle with ‘ROBERT BURNS’ spelt out in rainbow sprinkles.
It was still the kind of party Burns would have enjoyed – with song and merriment, loads of poetry and a wheen of lassies.
But then, you can pretty much argue that Burns would endorse any event – a Burns club night (Tam o’Shanter falls for Nannie during the dancing), Burns night classes (‘learn to grow your own Red Red Rose!’), Burns selfies (‘O wad some Power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us!’) and Burns pet insurance (look after that wee sleekit cow’rin tim’rous beastie).
The Burns of Immortal Memory is an endlessly adaptable myth that allows anyone to make their own reading: a romantic poet or a practical ploughman; a nationalist or a unionist; an abolitionist and a supporter of the slave trade; a champion of women’s rights or, according to Scotland’s former Makar, ‘a sex pest’.
THE writer Liz Lochhead has been mulling over the notorious Burns letter where he brags about rough sex with his girlfriend, later to become his long-suffering wife Jean Armour.
The letter ‘is very Weinsteinian’, according to Ms Lochhead, and it’s true that Burns’s approach to sex was aggressive.
When his first companion Lizzie Paton became pregnant, he dashed off two boastful poems, The Fornicator and The rantin’ dog, the Daddie o’t, and went on to have 15 children with six different women – one of whom was his wife – at a time when the only relief afforded abandoned women and babies was from the Kirk which Burns affected to look down on.
Robert Burns was not particularly progressive in his approach to women, like many men at a time when women were viewed as the property of men, and the atrocity of slavery went unrecognised.
It reminds you of George Orwell’s famous remark about Salvador Dali: it is possible to be a great artist and a miserable human being.
Yet despite serious problems, Burns and Jean Armour stayed together for the rest of his life. On that basis alone, he’s hardly Harvey Weinstein, any more that the producer of Gangs of New York was the Robert Burns of his era.
Why is Scotland so thirled to Burns – and would we be a different country if he had never lived and published? Our culture vultures might pay a little more attention to Robert Louis Stevenson, or be forced to work harder to accommodate Sir Walter Scott, a historical Tory who hardly chimes with the self-perception of certain virtue-signallers.
Hogmanay would have to find a new anthem for the departing year, and Alex Salmond would scrabble to find retorts to Channel 4 News or quotes to carve in stone which immortalise his illconceived education policies.
Winter sales of haggis would certainly take a dunt. Burns supper, scuppered; would that really be so offal?