Trying their damnedest
to discredit wur ain Rabbie.
By JACK MCLEAN
THEY have been trying
their damnedest for years. Discrediting wur ain Rabbie. For near a century the
literati and the chattering classes adopted a stance whereby Burns was indeed
uniquely gifted. ''But sadly,'' went the attitude, ''Burns was morally weak''.
Then they went on to relish his untimely end.
There is nothing the moralistic
bourgeoisie likes more than a comeuppance. His moral turpitude was gladly ended
with croaking it in Dumfries. If you have ever been in Dumfries you will realise
just how easy it would be to slip off this mortal coil. Dumfries is the sort of
douce wee town which could bore you into pneumonia.
This is not fair actually.
Dumfries had the decency to erect a splendid memorial to the Bard. It just didn't
have the decency to look after the poet when he was alive.
But then neither did Scotland.
There was a real reason for this. Those of you who have ever seen the painting
of the putative meeting betwixt Burns and the child Walter Scott allegedly occurring
in the Edinburgh Assembly Rooms will grasp the difference between the two and
the attitudinising which went on over the both.
Walter Scott was Tory
and tergiversatory. Burns was radical, randy, and ready to speak out. When Scott
set up the 1882 Edinburgh visit of that ninny, Prinny, then of course King, he
invented tartanry and grovelled at the fat man's hose. (King George IV wore pink
tights for the occasion.)
Scott was the son of a
lawyer and became a baronet. He died of apoplexy at the age of 63. He wrote drivel
about the aftermath of the '45.
Bilious joke
Every time you hear a
criticism of Harry Lauder and his kilts and haggis and curly sticks think again.
Harry Lauder was just a comedian; Sir Walter Scott it was who turned us into a
joke and an especially bilious one at that. But Burns turned us into a nation
and an international one at that.
When the charlatan MacDiarmid
launched his attack on the Burns cult in his Drunk Man he was right and wrong.
He was right about the
Burns club phenomenon. Like the Royal Caledonian Ball, in which a squad of insensitive
champagne charlies turn up in skirts with their mots in white dresses and tartan
sashes and the local teuchters tugging their forelocks, the Burns suppers, which
have been erupting this week and which will possibly suppurate my dears over the
next week or so, will see a display which Rabbie would have taken a repeater claymore
to.
But Grieves was wrong,
too. There is value in the Burns cult. I know that because I will, as I do every
year, make a right few bob out of the Burns supper circuit.
As it happens I don't
make that much at some of them. Lots of them I do for nothing. Take Wednesday,
when I spoke at the Burns lunch in Bothwell's Camphill Vaults. It was a grand
day out and believe me it was a day and at the end of it I was out.
Footballing legends abounded
in that splendid hostelry. There was George Young (Oh my Captain! Oh my Captain!),
and Joe Baker of Hibs and England, and the sylph-like legend of Ibrox and Burnbank,
Bobby Shearer.
There was a lot of people
altogether and what was it brought us altogether and what put a tear into the
glass eyes? What made Tom McLean blow his bagpipes until he was inside out? What
made us suddenly feel truly awfy Scottish? Burns did.
Greatest son
MacDiarmid and other scoffers
might excoriate the Burns cult but they did and do so because they cannot bear
the notion that the plain people of this country might just have got it right
at that and celebrate our greatest son to celebrate ourselves.
Another fine Scottish
stalwart, Tom Johnston, once claimed that his socialism didn't come out of Marx
or the Webbs: it came out of the Bible and Burns.
Decency we are talking
about. None of your baronetcies for Burns. He died skint and naked. Burns represents
the best in the Scots, and all the way through.
But in recent years there
has come another myth, a myth which no doubt Alan Bold will attempt to repeat
in tomorrow's blatt. I will bet you that Boldy will be saying that Rabbie was
never the rovin' rantin' Robin at all and had the adventurous sexuality of a Herald
columnist from a Wee Free background. There is a time now for this calumny to
be refuted.
I will tell you what Burns
was like. He was a fine, sonsie-looking man who took his dram with pleasure, and
who had his differences but kept his freens, to paraphrase. He pursued girls and
bedded them with alacrity. The boy wisnae blate.
There is a class of litterateur
these days -- and sadly Boldy seems increasingly to ape them -- who aspires to
a sort of literary vegetarianism. The feminists seem not to want the full-blooded
Burns. The new men want him to be as wimpish as themselves.
But that is not Robert
Burns. Not the one I honoured the other day with the Immortal Memory. I have been
trying to be Rabbie all my life: a worthy aim, I think.
Fri 22-Jan-1993
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