A Night Out with Burns

T
hey say the rain fell heavily that day. It was 25 January 1820 and Alexander Boswell – son of the more famous James – bent down to lay the foundation stone of what would become the Burns Monument, erected in Alloway near where the poet was born. From Carrick Hill, where the stone figure of Burns stands enclosed in Gothic ornament, you can see for many miles – over fields, rivers and bridges to the hearts of those towns that can track their life-blood in Burns's poems.

‘There surely lives,' said Alexander Boswell, ‘no man so dull, so flinty, or phlegmatic, who could witness this event without emotion. But to those whose heart-strings have thrilled responsive to the poet's lyre – whose bosoms have swelled like his, with love and friendship, with tenderness and sympathy, have glowed with patriotism or panted for glory – this hour must be an hour of exultation.'

But Alexander's tears, like those of a number of his contemporaries, must have been slightly salted with guilt, for few poets – even of the Romantic breed – had been allowed to die quite as penniless as Burns. The well-to-do of Edinburgh had lionised him for a season then dropped him like a sack of Ayrshire potatoes. One of his friends said that for every smart remark that came out of Burns's mouth, he made a hundred enemies.

It took nearly two dozen years to raise the money for the Alloway monument, and even then the subscription was short. Thomas Carlyle put the matter bluntly:

I once went in search of the Burns who mattered to people. It was a good few winters ago, and rain had frozen to snow, which lay thick on the ground of Alloway the day I arrived. The driver could hardly see anything; every few miles he stepped out to scrape the frost from the windscreen. The light was going – ‘dim-dark'ning thro' the flaky show'r/Or whirling drift' – and for a moment, but for the car, it seemed we could be in any century.

The whole of Alloway is now more or less given over to something called the Burns National Heritage Park. This includes Burns Cottage (the birthplace), plus a museum full of manuscripts and memorabilia (and toffee). It also includes the Old Alloway Kirk (where Burns's father is buried), the Burns Monument and a new building which houses the Tam o' Shanter Experience.

However grim the Burns family cottage was in 1759, it could hardly be any worse than it is now. You go in wearing earphones, and it's freezing and dark as you sit down to watch one of those heritage flicks full of Scottish sunsets and ruddy-cheeked people. The room where the Burns family sat together is cold and Calvinist: no crack of light or laughter there. Wooden dolls stand around a table, being taught all the good ways by a bigger doll in the shape of Burns's father.

The museum has some good first editions. The manuscripts of correspondence offer a lively view of Burns's life on earth. You see relics of his early education: a Bible and a book of English essayists; bits of French and Latin, evidence of good relations with a young
local teacher, John Murdoch, who considered Robert and his brother Gilbert to ‘have no ear for music'. Then there are artefacts relating to the life of a young man, a romancer and a hard worker: his razor and shaving mirror, his drinking vessels, his pendants, his pens and proof of their various productions.

As you look over these bits and bobs, a motion picture of Burns's life begins to roll. Born in that barn outside the museum, it was no time at all before the young Robert went wandering by the River Afton with his finger on his chin. The family moved to Mount Oliphant farm – not far away – when he was seven. An indication of the way things were to be came when Robert spied a blacksmith's daughter, Nellie Kilpatrick, and wrote a poem about how she'd captured his heart. His walks through Ayrshire brought further poems, chiefly about the things that caught his eye, and chiefly in the Scottish dialect.

He joined a dancing class at Tarbolton (to meet girls); he formed the Bachelors' Club (to meet his pals); he became a Freemason; and he tried to learn the trade of flax-dressing at Irvine, ten miles along the coast. Tales of affairs follow: girls getting pregnant; advances sought and sometimes rebuffed; troubles with the Kirk because of all his carry-on. We hear of his plans for emigration to Jamaica; his attempts to marry Jean Armour and his repudiation by her father; his loss of the adored Highland Mary, who may have died in childbirth; his shelving of the Jamaica plans; and his triumphant debut with the
Kilmarnock Poems
. Burns's life actually unfolds more like an opera than a film – no wonder Gene Kelly's ambition was to make a musical of it.

Burns made it in Edinburgh, where he'd gone on a borrowed donkey, but ventured home to poverty a few months later. He took a lease on a hopeless farm called Ellisland; he became an exciseman; his wife had more children, and so did women who were not his wife (Mrs Burns said that ‘Our Robin shoulda hud twa wives.') He started collecting old Scots songs, and rewriting many of them, for publication; he fell in and out with friends; he fell foul of
gossip-mongers and idiots, who ruined his chances of advancement in the Excise; he dissipated a bit, though probably not as much as people said at the time. He liked a drink. He had a bad heart – a mental case of a doctor thought to cure it by having him wade in the Solway Firth. But he died, aged 37, in a house up a scabby lane in Dumfries. He was feverish and ravaged, his heart was in bits, and there was hardly a penny in the house.

This is a little of what we know about Robert Burns. The episodes are like scenes in an overblown drama, and each is captured in the portraits and pocketbooks that stood around me in the Burns Museum. Out in the foyer were many of the productions of Burns's incredible afterlife: shortbread and haggis, tea-towels and trays, happy notepads and dodgy tapes. Everything for everybody, or nothing for nobody, depending on where you sit. The ‘Burns cult' that so annoyed Hugh MacDiarmid finds its primary – though quite harmless – expression in this gallery of trinkets and toffees. They are testament to how successful a brand name and face Burns has become. The shop sells the books as well, and collections of letters and lives. The other stuff is just tourism: people want to show they've been somewhere, even if they haven't been anywhere yet.

I had the Tam o' Shanter Experience on my own, bar one other person. It was a fairly big auditorium, well decorated with trees and atmospheric bits and pieces around the sides. The screen was split into three. Tam appeared in the middle panel, getting ‘fou and unco happy', and then the remaining screens were filled with the other characters in the tale as it unfolded. It was riveting, and I only wished there were some kids around to squeal and whoop and hide their faces as Tam gets involved with the witches.

A lot of the butchers and bakers in and around Ayrshire have the well-known Nasmyth portrait stuck to their shop windows, the way some cafés and grocers used to have the Queen, and some Italian delis still have the Pope. I wondered if it said something more than that, something like: ‘We sell haggis and shortbread in here.' Ayr is one of those towns that likes to make its traditions a big part of the here and
now. You can read your way from one end of the place to the other. Over here is the Brigate – the ‘path to the bridge' – which signifies that there must be a river down there; and over here is Kirkgate, the ‘path to the church'. Even if the bridge and the church no longer exist, you know that they once did because of the words that remain.

In Ayr I was looking for an address in the Sandgate, so I started walking towards the harbour and the shore. You imagine that you can smell the oily water and taste something of the salt. The man I wanted to speak to, Robin Jenkins, was in the makeshift Burns Festival offices. He worked for a government-sponsored agency called Enterprise Ayrshire, and the two outfits saw their objectives as being very much related. He was a big man, with big ideas that immediately seemed not unrelated to the bigness of his handshake. The Sandgate offices were chaotic: boxes of leaflets and publicity handouts were stacked everywhere; calls were coming in from around the world, calls from people interested in coming over to the Land o' Burns, taking part in the festivities, spending their money. John Struthers, the festival organiser, was walking briskly back and forth across the main office – sorting things, advising the telephonists, trying to get the national poet's anniversary do into full swing.

I asked Mr Jenkins what they were all trying to achieve through Robert Burns. ‘In marketing terms,' he said, ‘you're always looking for a unique selling point, a unique proposition. The south-west of Scotland is the only area in the world which has this connection with Burns. If you look at what he actually did in his lifetime – I think it's fair to say that “Auld Lang Syne” is the second most popular song after “Happy Birthday” – you see he is a very attractive product. People come to visit this area for golf, for castles and for Robert Burns.' Robin Jenkins knew his business, and he referred to Burns as a ‘product' (and Ayrshire as an ‘opportunity') in a completely unselfconscious way. I wondered whether it wasn't a bit desperate to focus so much on tourism, on the servicing of passers-by. Wasn't it a shoddy replacement for investment in real industry? ‘I refute that,' he said. ‘There are a lot of plus points in what we're doing.
We invested in Prestwick Airport, in local manufacturing and development. We want to get our product right. Today, in fact, our executive and some of our directors have flown down for a major promotional push in London. We want to make sure a lot of the people in the City are aware of Ayrshire as a major place to live, work and play in.'

The executives of Enterprise Ayrshire were trying to think of ways to make a success of the Burns initiative. They planned something called a Taste of Burns Country: 45 local companies would be marketed as producers and caterers of fine food at reasonable prices. Robin Jenkins said they were keen not to despoil Burns's message by linking it to the wrong products. Crawfords – the biscuit people – had asked if they could use the official Burns Festival logo on their new shortbread tin. The answer was yes. Safeway wanted to use the logo throughout their stores – and that was OK as well. Manufacturers of cheap scarves or useless pens, though, would not be allowed to brand their goods.

I asked Mr Jenkins how the marketing of Burns compared with the pushing of a theme park or a golf course. ‘Burns is a lot easier,' he said, ‘because there's a human interest aspect to him. I hadn't realised until I looked at some of the booklets and information on Burns how much he was almost ahead of his time. I mean, at the World Travel Market, we had this initiative where we promoted Ayrshire, Dumfries and Galloway together. I came across a phrase in one of his poems that said, “Welcome, welcome again”, and that just captures exactly what we're trying to do. People are welcome to come here, so long as they come again and again. I don't see any conflict in the use of that – so long as it's done in the best possible taste.'

Is there something special about Burns, that he so lends himself to commercial enterprise of this kind? The only rival would be Stratford-upon-Avon and its relationship with Shakespeare. Thomas Hardy inspires no such turnover in the land he called Wessex. Even in America – where Whitman-furters, the Emily Dickinson Matchstick Doll's House and the Emersonian Nature Kit would not
seem terribly out of place – there is nothing really to compare with the Burns trademark. There is no Twainworld to speak of, no Hawthorne Haunted House, or Ahab's Universe of Water. Burns did give imaginative life to the towns of Ayrshire, Dumfries and Galloway; he did, with quite unbelievable felicity, characterise the familiars of his time and place – those farmers, doctors, ministers, taxmen, peasant lassies and lairds – and he did exhibit extraordinary sympathy for nature, and a genius for understanding the way its productions relate to human feeling and for the special modes of expression in late 18th-century lowland Scotland. Who else could make so much of a mouse, and with so spectacular a result?

Burns was a satirist of the first water. No religious piety, no political hypocrisy, no brand of inhumanity or inequality, no cheerless idiocy or tactless ambition – even those he could claim as his own – remained as it had been after the best of his poetry. But these are qualities that exceptional people might have, that artists might deploy to the clamour of fame, and though it is very unusual for one person to carry so much newness in themselves, so much variety, and so to embody a tradition as well, it is not unprecedented. Even in that century of his – the century so derided by Carlyle, over which Burns was seen to stride like a colossus – several great persons stood in the way of Robert Burns's claim to the prize. So his genius alone will not explain the extent of his marketability, the sheer number and variety of mugs and tea-towels on which his face appears.