To a well-read bard: the appreciation of an American
who can see beyond the haggis
By LORN MACINTYRE
My students love Burns. Of course, maybe they're
just scared to tell me if they don't because they know I'm an enthusiast
WHEN a female American professor projects illustrations
of Robert Burns's skull on to a Strathclyde University screen on Saturday, there
should be remorse as well as revulsion. What haven't we done to our national bard?
We've dug him up; we dirk the haggis at verbose suppers in his honour; but we
don't teach him in our schools. How then can we expect his poetry to survive?
But now the bard has a brilliant new champion
in Professor Carol McGuirk, whose head has been turned by his brains, not his
looks, which she describes as plastic! Dr Andrew Noble, a senior lecturer in English
at Strathclyde University, knew it was time for a major reassessment of Burns
as soon as he read Robert Burns and the Sentimental Era, a 1985 study by Professor
McGuirk.
The result is Saturday's major conference at Strathclyde
University -- Burns Now -- which the Herald is sponsoring.
''It struck me that McGuirk's book is possibly
the best one ever written on Burns's poetry because it puts him back in a British
context,'' says Noble. ''At last we have someone technically sophisticated enough
to make us appreciate how technically sophisticated he was, because the notion
of the ploughman simpleton still lingers on. I think he was arguably the most
sophisticated poetic talent in the eighteenth century -- bar none.''
As a graduate student at Columbia University,
Professor McGuirk made Burns the subject of the dissertation that was to become
her acclaimed book.
''Because of the peculiar status of Burns as a
Scottish poet, it didn't occur to anyone to look at what he did with English and
Anglo-Scottish sources,'' she says. ''My idea was to put him into a context to
be discussed with other eighteenth-century figures. He was extremely well read
in English seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century poetry. He seems to have
had the poetry of Milton and Pope off by heart. In some ways he anticipates romanticism.
He uses a lot of mock epic and classical rhetoric in the ways he constructs his
arguments.
''Tam o' Shanter, for instance, is a mock epic
poem just as Pope's Rape of the Lock is. There are lines stolen from James Thomson's
The Seasons in Tam o' Shanter. The image of the rainbow 'evanishing' occurs in
one of The Seasons.''
But McGuirk knows the struggle it will be to spread
her enthusiasm on the other side of the Atlantic, where Burns is excluded from
anthologies. How is our bard with the universal philosopy to be given a hearing
in American schools?
''The problem is that very little poetry is taught
in American high schools right now. They teach a Shakespeare play or two, and
a great deal of American fiction, like Hawthorne. There's not that much English
literature taught, so it would be a very difficult task fitting Burns in because
you would have to bring in a number of other poets as well.'' Even if space were
found, there would be resistance. ''The language is perceived as a barrier, but
it's so easy to break that barrier down with a glossary, or to use some of the
songs that are mostly English. A great deal of Burns's work is almost cognate
with English; very little of it is densely vernacular.''
She's proved this herself, in her present post
as an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Florida Atlantic
University, where she runs courses in Scottish Literature and in mock epic poetry
in which she teaches Tam o' Shanter and other Burns poems. ''My students love
Burns. Of course, maybe they're just scared to tell me if they don't because they
know I'm an enthusiast. I use Jean Redpath recordings of the songs, and they love
those too.''
Andrew Noble is hoping there will be many teachers
in Saturday's audience. ''There's a major problem in our schools. That is, the
kids come into university having done no poetry whatsoever. All the cliches about
the telly are true; there's no doubt that these kids are reading next to nothing.
The past is another country for them. They have no sense of historical context
at all.''
Would he like to see Burns taught in Scottish
schools? ''Not taught as sentimental cliches, but as a major political poet.''
At university level, Strathclyde is strong in
Burns-teaching. ''While we have two specific Scottish literature classes, we have
no plans for a specific Scottish literature department as it's not in the subject's
best interest to be in a ghetto,'' Noble argues. ''The thing particularly stressed
in Carol McGuirk's, Ken Simpson's and my own Burns scholarship is both his cosmopolitan
reach and his synthesising of the English and Scottish traditions.
''It would be better for Scottish literature to
be seen in such a light. We're also teaching Scottish literature classes as part
of a new, co-ordinated Scottish Studies degree. As too much Scottish literature
is bad history and too much history is bad literature, we're trying to restore
balance.''
Noble pays tribute to the work of Donald Low at
Stirling University in bringing the bard to students. But the Burns barrier remains
at most educational levels. However, McGuirk's illustrated lecture on Saturday
could show a new way of interesting the young in Burns, by exploring the poetic
rendering that has turned the bard into an effete Elvis Presley at Graceland,
not Robert Burns at Ellisland.
McGuirk is working on a book on how the nostalgic
cult started. ''Sir Walter Scott said Burns looked like a captain of a ship or
a well-to-do merchant; he was burly.'' One of McGuirk's most eerie exhibits to
be shown on Saturday is a likeness of the poet's great-granddaughter, Miss Jean
Armour Burns Scott, superimposed on his face to prove the family likeness. ''She
was a very beautiful woman who tended one of the Burns monuments for years,''
says McGuirk, adding with distaste: ''The illustration was published after her
death.''
She suspects that the origins of the myth of the
self-destructive poet lie in the need of the first Burns biographer, James Currie,
to raise money for the poet's widow and children.
You can imagine a class going silent before reading
Tam o' Shanter, as the teacher explains what happened when they opened the poet's
coffin when they buried his widow, Jean Armour, in 1834. Saturday's privileged
audience will hear McGuirk's deduction: James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, was
probably present at the exhumation and ''pinched'' something for his Justified
Sinner. And when the poet's eldest son died, there was more ''skulduggery.''
Dr Ken Simpson, a senior lecturer in English at
Strathclyde and author of an important study about the crisis of identity in Scottish
eighteenth-century writers, will talk about Burns, Man and Poet, at the Saturday
School, and Edwin Morgan, visiting professor at Strathclyde, will give A Poet's
Response to Burns.
The theme of Andrew Noble's lecture will be Burns
and Scottish Nationalism. Could a Burns revival help the SNP? ''You're back to
a very complex political problem, because in a sense it's the problem of romantic
poetry's commitment to revolution, which fared extremely ill. There are in some
places in Burns direct incitements to violence, regicide as well as other things.
There's also a fantastic amount of bitterness.
''If Burns were alive today, he would be part
of a pan-European consciousness. He wasn't a provincial parochial person; he saw
himself operating in a cosmopolitan context.'' McGuirk agrees. Will her work in
progress, to be previewed on Saturday, correct the Burns myth? ''Probably not,''
this accessible scholar says cheerfully. ''But I might as well try.''
She was British Academy visiting professor at
Strathclyde in the English department last year. Considering the Burns treasures
in the Mitchell Library and elsewhere, would she like to work permanently here?
''Sure,'' she says, ''but we all know how many Scottish literature chairs there
are in Scotland.''
It would be worth creating one for Carol McGuirk.
For the sake of Auld Lang Syne.
* For information on places at Saturday's Burns
Now School, which includes songs by members of the Stramash group, phone Alison
MacDonald on 041-552 4400, ext 3516.
* Later this year Macmillan will publish A Burns
Companion, a long-awaited study of the poet by award-winning Scottish biographer
and poet Alan Bold. The Herald will carry a series of exclusive extracts from
this important, controversial work.
Thu 11-Jan-1990
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