A Night Out with Burns (3 page)

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.

All around the room, faces were rocking to the songs of Robert Burns. This was the 200th anniversary. There was clapping and a clattering of dishes, a clinking of glasses and raising of toasts; a haggis was addressed and split and served; whisky was drunk; and the strip-lights burned like beacons. There are many Robert Burnses, many of them, and none of them the same. There are as many Robert Burnses as there are people to care for him, and things to care for. As his funeral cortège made its slow way down the main street in Dumfries, a little boy was heard to say to his mother, ‘But who will be our poet now?' The answer, after all this time, is: ‘He will.' The glass in front of me was full again, and the lights had settled down. It was time for me to speak. Time to toast this town of mine, and the complicated memory of Robert Burns.

This volume grew out of a spirit of sociability: we wanted to fashion a book of Burns's best poems that would also include a story of how he might be read today. I thought it likely that Burns would object to the idea that the fun should be taken out of literature, and I wanted to restore it, at least in this edition, by sorting the work so as to greet that argument. Canonical writers are not always best served by their canonisers: the threat of the ‘set text' is very great, and we must allow ourselves to light on ways to ensure that a solemn presentation of greatness in a writer does not, for all its scholarly virtues, result in the writer remaining unread.

The poems I've chosen have found their way into four overarching categories: the lasses, the drinks, the immortals and the politics. Of course, the categories bleed into one another, but if you allow that this arrangement causes the poems to suggest one another in new ways, then you might forgive the insult my arrangement offers to chronology. There are great poems left out and, some would say, dubious ones left in, but I wanted to bring readers with me on a personal journey and a confrontation with the glory of the poet's work. It is for me the summation of many journeys, and this night out with Robert Burns confirms my feeling that he is the prince of poetry, not only for me or for Scotland, but for the world. It might have pleased the long-dead
boy beside the funeral cortège to know that Burns is indeed our poet – now, and for as long as the world has a care and a feeling for the dance of reality and imagination.

I
n the best work of the world's most representative poet, every word can sound like an effusion of pure spirit. And who could mistake Burns's genius when they encounter his beautiful lyric ‘Green Grow the Rashes'? He once introduced it by saying the song was written in ‘the genuine language of my heart'. A hymn to spontaneous affection over worldly desires, there is nothing else like it. I once knew a retired Ayrshire sailor, Mr Savage. I remember him singing this song one morning as he made his way along the seafront in the town of Saltcoats. The Firth of Clyde appeared to calm itself at the sound of the old man's voice, as he sang this lilting memorial to a great and simple sentiment.

O
ne can practically see the yellow light at the window of the dance-hall and feel the pulse of romantic hope, a new and lively element in the blood. And here she is, Mary Morison – as ‘the dance gaed through the lighted ha” – and we are caught immediately in the drama of her specialness. There is a grave in Mauchline churchyard to ‘the poet's bonnie Mary Morison, who died on 29 June 1791, aged 20'. Mary is a ghost among the drinking glasses, yet forever alive in the flow of these images.

I
wrote part of my first novel,
Our Fathers
, in the west of Ireland, alone in a house by the sea in County Cork. After dark, a regular beam of light from the Fastnet lighthouse would fall over the bed and I woke there one night with a weathered thought. It was to do with the Irish who had left for Scotland years before. I went back to my desk and wrote some lines about the main character's father, Tam. He ‘once wrote a letter to a cousin in Ireland, saying that he only stuck to the farm because of Robert Burns. “My habits are bad in the field,” he wrote, “but never mind, there's something to see in the battle for stuff over here, with the thought of the poet's hand there beside you.”' Tam then goes to the Ayrshire madhouse at Glengall and sings ‘The Belles of Mauchline' to his sick wife, and he kisses her.

B
urns had intended to emigrate with Mary Campbell to Jamaica, but she died in Greenock before they could leave. Each of Burns's lasses has a skirl of the country dance-hall about her and a scent of the Ayrshire fields, but not Mary. We imagine her spirit mingled with high foreign hopes and sea salt, caught up in the Atlantic roar.

A
love poem is a sudden encounter with one's own capacity for wonder; it is a settlement of joy amid the complications of affection. ‘A lyric poem,' writes James Fenton, ‘expresses an intense feeling of the moment. It is all about the subjective, all about the here and now. It is not – alas, for the loved one – a contract, or a prenuptial agreement.'

I
once sang this song in a gymnasium filled to the summit of the wall bars with tittering Ayrshire schoolchildren. It was St Luke's Primary School in the spring of 1978, and Mrs Ferguson, the headmistress, had decided there was only one boy for the job. I can still see my blushing face beside the old piano, and Fergie's vaguely nationalistic smile as she thumped the keys and nodded me in with a skoosh of pride. It wasn't entirely easy – aged ten – to conjure up my troubles with the saucy lasses, but from the corner of my eye I saw the girls coming into the gym ready for Jacqueline Thompson's ballet class, due to begin as soon as the Burns was over. The lasses were all hair-buns and slipperettes, and I know my voice lifted and reached out to meet the loveliness of their wicked faces.

R
obert Burns saw love as an expression of natural freedom, but he understood well enough that it might also be experienced as a mode of performance. In Edinburgh, he fell for a married lady, Agnes McLehose, or Nancy, who lived alone in Potter Row, and he turned their brief affair into a sometimes rapturous drama of drawing-room manners. They took arcadian names, Clarinda and Sylvander, and played their respective parts in a way that offered no great insult to sincerity. ‘Ae Fond Kiss' is proof of that: the final stanza, said Walter Scott, ‘contains the essence of a thousand love tales'.

A
birk
is a silver birch tree. It has a talent for growing in poor soil and a lifespan between sixty and ninety years. The bark is usually white and smooth, the twigs are waxy, and fresh green foliage appears to dress the trees in spring. The unobtrusive flowers appear in April and the small fruits in June.

K
enneth McKellar sings it with the sonority of the truly smitten. Peter Morrison sings it more expansively, as if he were gathering the earth's purest elements into a single song. Jean Redpath sings it as if she were reaching gently for the impossible and Ed Miller sings it wistfully, as if he were addressing a girl from a passing train. Eddi Reader brings to it a beautiful native airiness and Robert Wilson packs it with regret. Peter McCutcheon sings it as if through a fog of self-involvement and Carly Simon as if she were California dreaming. Davy Steele brings it home, investing the words with a simple belief and a show of love. But though Burns had many lasses, for me there can only be one – Mrs McGrath, a traditional Scottish singer, whose unaccompanied version is a wonderful feat of intimacy. She sings as if she intended the song for oneself alone.

A
s Burns lay dying at his house, the Mill Vennel at Dumfries, a girl who lived across the road would come each day to comfort him and assist his wife. Her name was Jessy Lewars and she played the harpsichord, causing Burns to ponder her sweetness and imagine himself in love with her.