[Published: The Daily Telegraph]
On 5th August 1786, the Nancy sailed out from Greenock under Captain Andrew Smith. Leaving the river Clyde behind, it would call at Antigua before going on to Jamaica. Its departure had been delayed by almost a month. Its most famous passenger was not aboard.
Much as every chip shop starts selling Deep Fried Mars Bars during the Edinburgh Festival, loving Robert Burns as a Scot can make you cringe. Every year we stab a haggis and run through Tam o’ Shanter (Tam getting drunk, the sexy witches, the chase on horseback, the final leap over the river to safety because “a running stream [witches] dare na cross”). Then the Immortal Memory, a speech lionising not just his poems but the man himself.
But was the great romantic really a rapist, ‘Scotland’s Weinstein’? And how could that famous egalitarian, the Ploughman Poet who believed “a Man’s a Man for a’ that,” support the moral horror of slavery?
There’s a simple reason Burns is important to young Scottish men like me. Burns is a blokey poet. Many of his poems are tributes to drinking (“freedom an’ whisky gang thegither”) and sex (“nine inch will please a lady”) and depression (“food fills the wame, an’ keeps us livin; tho’ lifes’s a gift no worth receivin”). “His person was strong and robust,” Walter Scott remembered, deep in the throes of a man-crush. His eyes “literally glowed.”
Getting past the ceilidhs and school recitals, he’s witty, bawdy and speaks to a particularly Scottish form of upbeat nihilism. As the man says, “the past was bad, the future hid; its good or ill untried O/but the present hour was in my pow’r, and so I would enjoy it O.” Recognising this side of ourselves (often mislabelled self-destructive) is a vital and healthy part of growing up Scottish. The ribald Tam o’ Shanter comes close to Japanese haiku in its melancholy description of transience:
But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flower, its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow falls in the river,
A moment white – then melts for ever;
Yet we live in a time when destructive masculinity has been exposed, and the likes of Louis C.K. have shown we can’t trust sensitive male heroes. Sure enough, a prominent Scots poet recently called Burns ‘Weinsteinian’
Burns was an infamous and honest lover of lassies and houghmagandie. He believed that women should enjoy sex too, and wrote to one of his many great loves, Nancy, that his life had benefitted from the “excellence of women.” (#woke, he might have added.) In Tam o’ Shanter, women have all the power – from the fearsome wife “gathering her brows like gathering storm/Nursing her wrath to keep it warm” to the coven of dirty-dancing witches.
But for all that, Burns was still a man. He fathered up to 18 children with at least four different women, the first by his family’s servant Elizabeth. (“Welcome my bonie, sweet, wee dochter! Tho’ ye come here a wee unsought for”) There’s a nasty edge to his pursuits. When his relationship with Nancy went unconsummated, he moved onto her servant Jenny.
He also enjoyed what another Scot’s son would call “locker room talk,” boasting of being an “old hawk at the sport” of seduction. This boorish side reached its darkest in one letter about Jean Armour, who was pregnant with his twins. In it he boasts he “f***d her till she rejoiced with joy unspeakable and full of glory,” before making her swear “never to attempt any claim on me as a husband.” The compact made, he “took the opportunity of some dry horse litter and gave her such a thundering scalade that electrified the very marrow of her bones.”
(Tellingly, my old copy of his letters elides this entire section with three dots.)
Liz Lochhead, Scotland’s former Makar, made headlines recently when she claimed this “disgraceful sexual boast” seemed “very like rape of his heavily pregnant girlfriend.”
“It’s very, very Weinsteinian.”
Her comments prompted outcry. “I think we have to be careful that we’re not comparing the standards of the time Burns lived in to the standards that we have today,” says Caroline Smith from the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, “If you compare our society to the 1960s and 70s, that’s changed quite a lot, and that’s only 50 years ago.”
“It would not have been considered gentlemanly, or moral, or even humane,” Lochhead responds to this defence, “even at the time.”
But this isn’t the real issue; the true worry among Burns fans is the same as surrounds Aziz Ansari, Louis C.K. and Woody Allen. It’s the pathetic question you whisper anyway: can I still like his work?
“Of course you can, and I hope you will, keep reading and enjoying Burns,” Lochhead tells me. “When did the personal shortcomings of an artist ever invalidate their work? Burns was a very complicated person, sincere in his many conflicting personae.”
“Not a hypocrite tho, that’s one thing, but a mass of contradictions.”
Maybe, but there is the feeling that those women are gathering power, catching him up through history, snatching at his horse’s tail. Although he would later go on to marry Jean, this was far from the only rocky moment in their relationship.
Burns’ poor farming background gave him a love for the little guy. To a Mouse – an apology for destroying the beastie’s home with his plough– is a poem about privilege: an acknowledgement that Burns may be lowly, but there are still those below him he can hurt thoughtlessly. In 1792, he wrote The Slave’s Lament, which gave voice to a slave kidnapped from Africa to “the lands of Virginia,-ginia, O.”
Go back a few years, before he struck it big. In 1786, with his farm a disaster, he booked passage on a ship called Nancy to Jamaica, where he had a job lined up. Burns would be travelling with his current love ‘Highland Mary’, who, according to legend, he had wed in a traditional ceremony, standing on either bank of a stream, holding a Bible between them. His fiancé Jean would be left on the shores of Scotland. She was currently pursuing him for child support.
With the Nancy’s voyage delayed, he needed to raise money. He took a chance and sent some of his poems to be published in Edinburgh. “‘Twas a delicious idea that I would be called a clever fellow,” Burns later explained “even though it should never reach my ears [as] a poor Negro-driver.”
In Jamaica, Burns was to be an accountant on a slave plantation.
A few months later, Mary had died of fever, the Nancy had left without him and Burns was a literary sensation. There is a version of Scottish history where our national poet managed slaves. We are living in the version of Scottish history where slavery directly inspired Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect.
“When I’m taught Burns at school, why am I not taught our connected history, our links to the slave trade,” asks video artist Graham Fagen. Working with musician Sally Beamish and producer Adrian Sherwood, he made his own version of The Slave’s Lament that examined “why Jamaican reggae meant so much more to me growing up in a council estate on the West Coast of Scotland than Burns did.”
In 2007, he took the poem to Princeton – where local artists swapped ‘Virginia’ for ‘Jamaica’. Last year, reggae artist Ghetto Priest performed the modern arrangement at the Edinburgh Festival.
“Via holy voodoo quantum leap,” says the singer. “I believe Burns called upon me to dispense those lyrics in the now. It’s a story of my ancestors, and it’s beautiful to be an alchemist, to take your lowest point and turn it into gold.”
For Priest, the song shows Burns’ empathy. “You would definitely have thought it was a slave who wrote that,” he laughs, “not an overseer!” He views Burns’ decision to take the job as a result of his circumstances.
“In my culture, there’s a saying: wherever the goat is tied up is where he feeds.”
And yet, our poet’s story should force Scottish people to confront our own history. There’s a Glasgow in Jamaica, and a couple of Cullodens. 60% of the names in the phone book are Scottish – Campbells, Browns, all that. A great many Scots saw the slave trade as a way out of poverty, and a great many others used it to get rich. Like Burns and his love of women, Scotland’s “honest poverty” wasn’t entirely noble.
“If you’re not taught this side of it,” says Fagen, “you end up with this romanticised notion of us being a unique national identity and race, when in fact we’re not. We’re as human as all the other humans.”
For Ghetto Priest, it’s not about recrimination, but people recognising all sides of themselves, good and bad.
“A devil couldn’t have written Slave’s Lament,” he notes.
Reconciling Burns’ contradictory sides is difficult. I couldn’t get the Scottish culture minister to give me a statement about our bard for this article. He was a man of beauty who did ugly things. But for all that and all that, he’s still our man, a reflection of us. His failings are our failings: believing our suffering excuses the suffering we cause; believing time will dissolve our sins like snow in the river. We cannot leave our problems standing on the shore behind us. Burns’ Immortal Memory should remember all of him: the Nancies he pursued and the Nancies he avoided. Only then will we live up to his promise that…
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
It’s coming yet for a’ that,
That Man to Man, the world o’er,
Shall brothers be for a’ that.