Still being talked about

Máirtín Seán Ó Catháin assesses Burns’ presence in the 20th century

Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics: The Bard of Contention, 1914-2014

Paul Malgrati Edinburgh University Press, (Edinburgh, March 2023) pp.280 Hardback, £85 e-book, £85

ISBN: 9781399503457

The Glasgow Herald columnist, Tom Shields, recounted a story in one of his published collections of an inaugural Burns’ supper held, unusually, by a Celtic supporters’ club many years ago. After several songs of a decidedly non-Burns character and no toasts given to the immortal memory but numerous rounds of drinks, an empty bottle was thrown at the picture of the bard on the wall.This apocryphal tale may, or may not, have fitted neatly into Paul Malgrati’s study of Robert Burns’ image, meaning and legacy for several generations of Scots in what might be termed the long 20th century. It is a study that sparkles with enthusiasm, energy and a keen critical engagement with its subject though also one perhaps that adopts a bit of a presentist approach to the past.That, of course, is a challenge for anyone writing about such an iconic figure as Burns against the backdrop of recent history and the debate, in particular, about Scotland’s relationship to the rest of the UK.

Malgrati, a French émigré to Scotland and therefore someone with no particular axe to grind, seems ideally suited to his research topic. His introduction, which owes much to the work of Professors Chris Whatley and Colin Kidd, begins by outlining the complicated 19th-century reception and commemoration of Robert Burns.This broadly aligns with Whatley’s interpretation of an elite take-over of the bard’s legacy and a generally conservative and imperial emphasis on Burns embraced by Liberals andTories alike.This is then contrasted in the first three chapters with the story of the gradual reclamation of the poet in the 20th century by the Left and later nationalists, who establish the progressive interpretation of Burns, which arguably dominates today, though necessarily remains contentious.The turning point for this ‘Burnsian reformation’ as Malgrati terms it, combining what he calls ‘iconoclasm of form with radicalism of content’, takes place in the inter-war years and is more or less complete, as he makes clear in chapter four, by the end of the Second World War. Thereafter, a mixture of Cold War pressures which contribute to a siting of the poet at the nexus of British-Soviet cultural relationships, covered in chapter five, give way to the rise of a newer nationalist challenge to the Burns legacy, driven in some ways by the folk song revival, which is the focus of chapter six.The final two chapters of this lively study chart the increasing purchase on the Burns leitmotif gained by Scottish nationalists over the last 40 years, but the author is at pains to stress that the memorialisation of the bard has been marked by conflicting processes that do not seem likely to end anytime soon.

Malgrati’s deft handling of his subject ends with an epilogue rather than a conclusion, but provides a compelling argument for Burns’ enduring and malleable appeal as a ‘keystone of Scottish cultural politics’. In the end, in spite of the many challenges and vicissitudes of the Burns memory and legacy charted in this book, its core message seems to suggest ‘the Bard is deid, lang live the Bard’.

Dr Máirtín Seán Ó Catháin is a senior lecturer in modern Irish history at the University of Central Lancashire. He contributes to a new collection marking fifty years of the Irish Labour History Society, Labour History in Irish History, (Dublin, 2023), and is co-editor of the Routledge Handbook on the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace Process, (London, 2023).