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A’ OOT O’ STEP BUT OOR JOCK
by Joseph Fisher
The Canongate Burns: The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns
edited by Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg
Canongate Books, 1017pp, £14.99pbk, ISBN 0-86241-994-8
O
N HIS SEAL Robert Burns engraved ‘Wood-notes Wild’; had he
possessed the ‘true prophetic fire’ he might have been better to have
chosen ‘Wha’ Daur Meddle Wi’ Me’, for the most easily recognised Scottish
icon is, without doubt, ‘The Bard’ — click on it and immediately a multitude
of mutually antagonistic pop-up and drop-down menus jostle for attention.
Once again the Icon has been pressed — this time in the form of two publications
which have recently become a joint cause célèbre — Patrick S. Hogg’s Robert
Burns: the Lost Poems, 1997, and The Canongate Burns, 2001, edited by
Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg. If one were asked to say, briefly, what
the consensus opinion on these two volumes has been, it would be difficult
to avoid producing a list of descriptions like ‘over-politicised’, ‘incomplete
documentation’, ‘slovenly’, ‘full of personal abuse’, ‘slipshod scholarship’.
The requirement for reviewing a work of imaginative literature is, not
surprisingly, imagination; little more other than a table, chair, good light. It is
quite another thing with a work of scholarship; without a level of scholarship
matching that of the work, the necessary questions cannot be asked, nor the
answers judged. For instance if our author states ‘In 1795 there was a shortage of
labour on the land throughout Scotland’ — was there a shortage? Where, when,
why? ‘The political upheaval in Caesar’s Rome may have been superficially
similar to the early 1790s, and the contrast probably....’ Was it, and how
superficial or probable was it? ‘Burns having previously and singularly grouped
these radicals together [Demosthenes and Cicero]....’ Singularly? Coupling these
two ‘pleaders’ was a commonplace. ‘Textually, there is no example amongst
his poems where he employed the colloquial common-language usage of ‘was’
in place of ‘were’’. Is there none — where did you look? The need to accept
or refute pages of such statements (most unsupported), to have to track down
and compare a multitude of variant readings and various copy-texts does not
make for quick reviews. The situation has similarities with Joyce’s suggestion
that the reader of Finnegans Wake should take as long as he took to write it.
However, the two works in question quickly disclose enough easily recognisable
defects as allow us to attempt an immediate review.
Having pressed The Bard icon so emphatically, the two publications
speedily attracted widespread attention — sufficient at least for media references
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to appear in the Daily Mail, Daily Record, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Express,
Herald, Scotsman, Times and Mirror. Two points seem to have impressed the
newspapers — it was a BARGAIN (all of Burns except his letters!), it was a
DISCOVERY (lost poems!).
Then came the sound bites — Jimmy Reid, Scotsman ‘... just about
the best book on Burns I’ve clapped eyes on’; Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
— ‘Congratulations, then, to the Edinburgh-based Canongate ... this edition
does them great credit’; Andrew O’Hagan — ‘... the long introduction ... is
alone worth the cover price’; Roderick Watson (General Editor of the Canongate
edition) ‘There is good evidence to suggest that these [the lost poems] are the
works of Burns.’
What were the intentions of the editors in creating this new Burns
edition? The Hunting of the Snark informs us that ‘What I tell you three times
is true’ and three times the editors assure us of the unique nature of their
intentions:
1.‘... textually and contextually [a favourite phrase, this] this edition ... lays
unique emphasis ... on Burns’ necessarily ironic and often oblique political
life and poems’. Note the word order — first, ‘political life’ then ‘poems’. It
would be an interesting exercise to determine the exact meaning of ‘unique
emphasis’, ‘necessarily ironic’ and ‘often oblique’ [my italics] and to muse on
Alice’s puzzlement — ‘The Hatter’s remark seemed to have no meaning in it,
and yet it was certainly English.’
2. ‘... the primary impulse behind this edition ... [is] to make Burns available to a
contemporary Scottish consciousness, that is hopefully more openly responsive
to the man, his values and above all his poetry than has largely been the case
over the last two centuries.’
3. ‘The essential purpose of this edition ... has been to update Burns by
recontextualising him into the 1790s, a central figure in British radical
consciousness and widely admired in that circle.’
So there!
The Canongate Burns divides into three sections — Introduction, Editorial
Policy and Practice and eight sections covering Burns’ poetic output.
What does, or should, the Introduction introduce? One might look
for a chronology, something on 18th century Scottish social, political and
religious circumstances, what the Scottish poetic tradition was and Burns’ place
in it. Instead, full 80% is devoted to elucidating how ‘out of a background of
constantly threatening poverty, a profound sense of communal, economic and
political dissolution, bloody international warfare on land and sea, failure to
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make a living after being initially declared a poetic genius, a revolutionary
spirit [my italics] will emerge.’
A similar misjudgement is displayed in the Editorial Policy and Practice.
It opens with ‘... nineteenth century editors were seriously remiss, with various
degrees of ignorance and prejudice, in [needs a ‘not’, surely] providing a
proper context for the poems and the politically fractious culture out of which
they emerged.’ Then follow some diatribes directed at their predecessors.
These remarks do not directly concern the proper and legitimate criticism of
the work of the editors; I have included them below, however, as examples of
a remarkably consistent and widespread blackguarding of their predecessors
which is the very reverse of reputable scholarship.
On Henley and Henderson: ‘Towards the end of the century the HenleyHenderson edition of 1896 brought Burns scholarship to a nadir ... Burns’
distinctive habit of spelling place and proper names in capitals, italicising
idioms and ironies and his use of long dashes are virtually all purged from
their edition. This constant, careless editorial meddling seriously disrupts the
intelligence of the rhythm of the poems ... so that the poet’s voice is significantly
demolished.’
On J. De Lancey Ferguson: ‘Despite his great scholarly virtues, De
Lancey Ferguson was not sufficiently equipped in either the political history
of ideas or comparative Romantic scholarship needed to provide ... the literary
and political context needed.’
On G.Ross Roy: ‘Sadly, Oxford’s expensive re-edition [sic] of the
[Burns] letters in 1985 arguably achieved its most significant addition by
appending Professor G.Ross Roy’s name as editor.’
On J.A.Kinsley: ‘ ... his edition carries many of the omissions and
prejudices of nineteenth-century scholars ... such wilful obscurantism.’
On J. Mackay: ‘[his] 1993 edition ... parasitically plunders Kinsley’s
volume 3 annotations ... and ... reproduces the worst Burns text available, that
of the corrupt Henley-Henderson edition’.
But of their own editorial practice — nothing. However, there is a small,
informative glimpse of at least one of the editors’ methods in The Lost Poems.
We find no mention here of computational stylistics. Instead Hogg writes of
‘a detailed scan using the Mitchell Library’s CD Rom Poetry Database’. He is
actually referring to an excellent commercial product, the Chadwyck-Healey
English Poetry Full-Text Database, and not, as he seems to suggest, some
sort of home-made library tool. He also says that the ‘stylistic [my italics]
procedure employed here ... is based on a detailed word analysis using Burns
A-Z: The Complete Word Finder’. This is no more than a bog-standard Burns
concordance, but what is extraordinary is that this ‘tool’ is the work of their
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arch enemy, Dr James Mackay!
The Works section starts with the three editions Burns corrected for
the press — Kilmarnock 1786, Edinburgh 1787 and 1793. We are not given
any information on these — for example how many copies of the Kilmarnock
were printed, an examination of the subscribers to the Edinburgh editions,
even what the poet’s profits were. All mundane matters, no doubt, but still of
some relevance.
The editors’ aim is to show how ‘[Burns] chose creatively to reveal
himself in the work published in his lifetime under his own name’. Considering
their denigration of the Henley-Henderson 1896 edition as the ‘nadir’‚ of
scholarship, it is odd that here they should adopt its methods. The latter
describes, truthfully, the second and third sections of poems as they appear in
their edition as containing ‘Added in 1787’‚ and ‘Added in 1793’‚ whereas
the Canongate blithely (and misleadingly) calls them ‘The Edinburgh Edition,
1787’ and ‘The Edinburgh Edition, 1793’. Burns’ textual procedure has always
been bedevilled by his way of working; Carol McGuirk points out how it was
his habit to send multiple MS. copies of his poems to friends, acquaintances
and patrons, and to do serious revision of his printed text when new editions
were called for. As a result it is, first, next to impossible to select a significant
copy-text. Second, his revisions were often made in response to his Edinburgh
‘friends’ — ‘I have made some small alterations in what I had before printed
— I have the advice of some very judicious friends amongst the Literati here’
(or, as McGuirk puts it ‘his genteel but poem-deaf mentors’). It is difficult, in
the absence of any textual apparatus, to source the text Noble and Scott Hogg
do print. When we can, we often find a later and inferior version being used. An
excellent example of this can be found in the ‘The Twa Dogs’. The Kilmarnock
edition has ‘An’ purge the bitter ga’s and cankers,/ O‚ curst Venetian b-res and
ch-ncres’. In the Edinburgh editions it has become smoothed (no doubt by the
Literati) into ‘An’ clear the consequential sorrows,/ Love-gifts of Carnival
Signioras’. The Canongate not only uses the ‘genteel’ second version but omits
any reference to the existence of the forthright, earthier Kilmarnock version.
Another similar example is in ‘Poor Mailie’ where the version ‘An’ warn him,
what I winna name’ is given, rather than the Kilmarnock’s undisguised ‘An’
warn him, ay at ridin time.’
Other oddities are the filling-in of asterisked or dashed words — not
always a great loss, (although it does prevent us from knowing which words
Burns thought were naughty!) — and an inconsistent removal of italics. The
latter can be particularly annoying, for Burns often uses italics to give extra
stress. Thus in ‘To a Mouse’ he writes ‘Still art thou blest, compared wi’ me!’
The Canongate gives us a sotto-voce ‘me!’
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Oddities in their footnotes are too many for mentioning. However, here
are two samples, one of commission, one of omission. In ‘The Twa Dogs’ the
footnote defines ‘Factor’ as ‘an Estate manager, who cleared many ‘cottars’
from large estates....’ A factor was and is merely the legal term for a‘doer’,
an agent, a deputy — he could look after anything, from a tenement building
to an estate. ‘The Death ... of Poor Mailie’ has a footnote inserted by Burns
himself, identifying ‘Hughoc’ as ‘A neebor herd-callant’. It appears in every
edition I have looked at — except the Canongate.
Much has been said about their over-enthusiastic glossary. Is it necessary,
for instance, to gloss such repeated commonplaces as ‘hae’, ‘awa’, ‘lanely’,
‘frae’, ‘wha’, and ‘twa’? It reaches absurd lengths when ‘whare’ is glossed as
‘where’! Let McGuirk have the final word. She quotes a contemporary reviewer
of the Centenary edition who described such an over-the-top glossary as ‘a
students’ torchlight procession escorted by mounted police’!
One most extraordinary omission is the lack of any index other than
title. Most people remember a poem’s first line, for instance, ‘Fair fa’ your
honest, sonsie face’ rather than ‘Address to a Haggis’; many people want to
find, say, Lord Glenconner, Wordsworth or Ellisland — they will look in vain
for indexes which no edition of worth has ever lacked. First lines, persons,
places are absent, closing so many entrance gates.
Let us suppose that much of what the editors say about Burns’ politics
can be substantiated and certainly, at the very least, the editors have made a
good case for an overdue investigation into the entirety of the poet’s radical
output and of his links with the dark underworld of late 18th century Scottish
radicalism. But, and it’s a big but, will the results of such research increase in
the slightest the pathos of ‘Ae Fond Kiss’, augment the electric charge of “The
wan moon sets behind the white wave”, amplify the combination of sound,
motion and light of “Yestreen when to the trembling string/ The dance gaed
thro’ the lighted ha’”?
Finally, I would like to single out two reviewers who I think have
seriously and in detail animadverted on the Canongate — Patrick Crotty
(Academy for Irish Cultural Heritage, Londonderry), in the Times Literary
Supplement , and Gerard Carruthers (School of English and Scottish Language
and Literature, Glasgow) in The Drouth and Studies in Scottish Literature. Their
respective conclusions can well bear repeating here. Crotty states: ‘There is
comfort to be derived from the certainty that Burns will survive their attentions
and inattentions.’ Carruthers writes: ‘ ... to conclude so readily ... that they are
mining a secret vein of Burns represents yet another (and modern and also
sentimental) version of ‘Burnomania’. Burns continues to struggle from under
a weight of word.’
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It was once said of the Victoria & Albert Museum that it was ‘A naff café with
rather a nice museum’. Perhaps we should think of the Canongate Burns as ‘A
political polemic with some rather nice poems.’