Is it OK for us to celebrate Burns Night?
Scotland’s national poet was a less savoury character than many realise – but how much should this bother us, asks Jonathan Holmes
L ike chip shops selling deep fried Mars bars to tourists at the Edinburgh Fringe, for Scottish people, Burns Night can be a bit of a Tartan cringe.
For a start, even us Scots can struggle with Robert Burns’s heavy language. Walter Scott once said his poems “would break the teeth of most modern Scotchmen”.
The annual celebration of the poet tonight can seem downright bizarre to the uninitiated: there are toasts, someone recites the Burns poem
Tam o’ Shanter (about drunkenness and sexy witches), then we stab a haggis like a ritual sacrifice. Finally, the Immortal Memory, a long speech lionising the great man’s legacy. Then we get drunk – or “fou and unco happy”, as Burns put it.
It’s halfway between a book group and a cult ceremony – but harmless, right? Perhaps not any more.
In this post-weinstein age, there are uncomfortable questions to be asked about Burns himself. Was the great romantic actually little more than – as a prominent Scots poet recently declared – a rapist? And was this famous egalitarian, the Ploughman Poet who believed “a Man’s a Man for a’ that,” a supporter of the moral horror of slavery?
To a Scot, Rabbie Burns, the Bard of Ayrshire, is a literary God among men, thanks to his witty, clever poems that touch on the things of everyday life. Born in 1759, the son of a self-taught tenant farmer, he grew up in humble surroundings and started to write poetry while ploughing the fields.
First published in 1786, he became known for his astute social commentary and wry take on politics, and was a source of inspiration to the founders of liberalism and socialism. He died tragically young, at 37, from rheumatic fever, after a lifetime of poor health (not helped by his drinking).
Schoolboys have always loved him for his blokeiness. Many of his poems are tributes to our loves and weaknesses: drinking (“freedom an’ whisky gang thegither”), sex (“I’ve lately been on quarantine, a proven Fornicator”) and depression (“food fills the wame, an’ keeps us livin; tho’ life’s a gift no worth receivin”). We men have been seduced by him for years. “His person was strong and robust,” Scott remembered, deep in the throes of a man-crush. His eyes “literally glowed”.
Yet there’s no doubt that Burns was something of a playboy – and undeniably callous when it came to the opposite sex. He wrote to one of his many great loves, Nancy, that his life had benefited from the “excellence of women” (when his relationship with Nancy went unconsummated, he moved on to her servant Jenny).
He fathered at least 12 children, and possibly more, with at least four different women – the first by his family’s servant, Elizabeth. He planned to move to the Caribbean with one woman, “Highland Mary” – leaving behind on the shores of Scotland his fiancée Jean, who was pursuing him for child support.
He also enjoyed what another Scot’s son – Donald Trump – might call “locker room talk”, boasting of being an “old hawk at the sport” of seduction. In one letter, written to a friend about Jean Armour, who was pregnant with his twins, he boasts that he “f----- her till she rejoiced with joy unspeakable and full of glory” – before making her swear “never to attempt any claim on me as a husband”. (He would, later, go on to marry her.) The contract made, he sealed the deal by taking “the opportunity of some dry horse litter and gave her such a thundering scalade [a military assault] that electrified the very marrow of her bones”.
Liz Lochhead, Scotland’s former Makar (Poet Laureate), made headlines recently when she revealed that, in a speech she is to make next week about Burns and women, she planned to call this latter conquest a “disgraceful sexual boast”, that seemed “very like rape of his heavily pregnant girlfriend. It’s very, very Weinsteinian.”
Her comments prompted outcry. “I think we have to be careful that we’re not comparing the standards of the time Burns lived in to the standards we have today,” says
‘He planned to leave behind on the shores of Scotland his fiancée, who was pursuing him for child support’
Caroline Smith, of the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum.
“It would not have been considered gentlemanly, or moral, or even humane,” Lochhead hits back in an email to me. “Even at the time.”
Then there’s the slavery issue. Yes, Burns may have had a love for the underdog – in 1792, he wrote The Slave’s Lament, which gave voice to a slave kidnapped from Africa to “the lands of Virginia, -ginia, O” – but he also, in 1786, accepted a job helping to manage a slave plantation in Jamaica.
The only reason he didn’t take up the position was that the ship that was supposed to take him out to Jamaica was delayed on its voyage and so Burns, needing money to keep him going in the meantime, published his first volume of poetry to raise funds for the trip, whereupon he quickly became a literary sensation and devoted himself to a life in letters instead.
Whichever way you look at it, our national folk hero fully intended to become a beneficiary of the slave system in Jamaica before fate dealt him a different hand. The poet Jackie Kay, the current Makar, has previously written about how Scots take “comfort in the notion that Scotland was not nearly as implicated in the horrors of the slave trade as England”; that our self-image “is one of a hard-done-to wee nation, yet bonny and blithe”.
At this year’s Edinburgh festival, she joined with Scottish video artist Graham Fagen for a show called Had We Never, which explored the moral and artistic challenges thrown up by Burns’s relationship with slavery. There is certainly an argument that our poet’s story should force Scottish people to confront our own history: a great many Scots of the time saw the slave trade as a way out of poverty, and a great many others used it to get rich.
In the words of reggae artist Ghetto Priest, who performed The Slave’s Lament at the show, “wherever the goat is tied up is where he feeds” – in other words, this sort of thing is often a matter of circumstances and options. Yet, says Fagen, “if you’re not taught this side of [the slave trade], you end up with this romanticised notion of us being a unique identity and race, when in fact we’re not. We’re as human as all the other humans”.
So is it still OK to enjoy the poetry of Burns and to celebrate Burns Night? Lochhead is adamant that
“of course, you can. When did the personal shortcomings of an artist ever invalidate their work?” Fagen says there’s nothing wrong with celebrating Burns Night, as long as “you think about what it is you’re celebrating”.
Like many totemic artistic figures, Burns’s contradictions are essential parts of his genius. He was a man of beauty – witty, talented, capable of great ugliness and great humanity. As Ghetto Priest notes, “a devil could not have written those words”. And he still speaks to a particularly Scottish outlook – with an upbeat nihilism, with the sense that life is hard and we’re all sinners, and that we all fall short, so let’s try to make the best of it.
His Immortal Memory should remember all of him, his life-affirming qualities and his unsavoury ones also. “Burns was a very complicated person,” Lochhead says, “sincere in his many conflicting personae.”
Or to put it as Burns himself would say: “A man’s a man for a’ that.”