The Poet's Funeral

Yesterday was the day on which, in 1796, Robert Burns was buried in Dumfries, in a simple grave in St Michael's churchyard. The big, ostentatious monument only came later. The funeral was far from simple. Invitations were sent out in Robbie, the poet's eldest son's name, as was the custom. The night before was showery but the day of the funeral turned out to be sunny, just in time for the grand procession. The weather this week, here in the West of Scotland, has been much the same. All those fine people who had crossed the street to avoid Rab a little while before, when the adulation had changed to small town disapproval, came out to show how much they had loved the great bard. And in spite of his wishes to the contrary, the 'awkward squad', the Dumfries Volunteers, not very efficient or soldierly, did indeed fire over him.

Jean was at home, giving birth to his last child, a son called Maxwell. The night after the funeral, Jean's husband came home, briefly. That's what she recounted later. And here's my version of it.

'The whole house was quiet, Maxwell swaddled in her arms, She had been singing to the new wean until he slept and she saw Rab coming into the room. He was as bold and clear as though he had still been in life and, she thought, rather more healthy than the last time she had laid eyes on him, a gleam in his eye and a flush of sunlight on his cheek. 
She was not afraid.
When had she ever been afraid of him? Rather she felt the wee bubble of laughter, even in the most serious of situations, at the general absurdity of everything, even the worst of things. She looked up at him while he gazed down at her and, in particular she thought, at the baby. Well, why not? He had aye loved the weans best, loved the curve of their cheeks, the soft, vulnerable place at the back of the neck, their perfect wee fingers and toes. Then he shook his head sadly, as though regretting that he could not stay, and disappeared, so suddenly that it seemed like a snowflake, melting away in your hand.' 

The Drizzler

Armour's the jewel for me of them all.

Somewhere in my new novel about the life and times of Robert Burns's wife Jean Armour, there's a reference to the practice of 'drizzling' and 'drizzlers'. When I first heard about this, the eighteenth century – and largely female – practice of snipping precious metal embellishments from male garments, with or without the wearer’s permission, and selling the gold and silver to be melted down, I was intrigued by the notion and of course, it found its way into the novel. You'll have to read the book if you want to know who, when and where! I say in the end note to the book that everything either happened or could have happened, so you'll have to make up your own mind about certain events. Although you might be surprised ...

Anyway, a good long while before I wrote the Jewel, I was so intrigued by the notion of drizzlers that I wrote a poem in the persona of one of them. I thought you might like to read it, so here it is.

THE DRIZZLER

The play’s the place for this game,

crowded halls, assemblies, balls.

I keep a pair of scissors in my

needle case, birds of steel, their

beaks as sharp as my tongue and

a spool for winding my booty on.

My skirts are a garden,

how my nimble needle flies.

A froth of smuggled lace at my wrist

hides my hand from prying eyes.

Peacocks are my prey.

Rich young men or old no matter

so long as their coats are fancy.

Roses, purls and picots are good,

dangling spangles are easy,

acorns are fine, fringes are better

but I have grown so bold that

I have slit silver buttons from their

waistcoats beneath their noses

and I remember one young buck who

wore medallions of beaten gold

with cupids and I had them I had them but

I was sorry to send such cherubs for melting.

Some women call their pillage flirtation.

What can their gallants do but submit?

But the covert assault excites me more.

I gauge them from behind my fan.

Up close, their hearts beat far too loud to

hear the slice of blade on blade.

They never see my work.

They’re watching the shady cleft

between my breasts, they never catch

the swiftness of my hand

between their baubles but

with their warm lips on mine

I’ll palm my shears and

clip their treasures one by one.

My mother died when I was

much too young to grieve.

My father pays lip service to thrift while

donning his powdered wigs, his velvets,

his hose, his ruffled linen shirts.

So I’ll take what’s offered elsewhere

snipping in secret, concealing my

rich pickings in my sleeve.

Later, I’ll tease my stolen gold from

silken thread and take it to the old woman

who weighs it on her scales and

hands me a few coins instead.

Pin money. It’s never enough

but the thought of this subtle robbery

makes me flush and catch my breath.

I’ll prick their vanity with my tiny shears.

A small piracy.

We are drizzlers.

We are buccaneers.

A Treasure Hunt and a Slightly Spooky Experience.

Last night was our annual village 'Car Treasure Hunt'. We've been doing these on and off for years. In fact it's a testament to the relative peacefulness of Ayrshire's roads, that they are still possible in these parts. For anyone who has never participated before, you pay a small sum towards whatever good cause has been nominated, get a sheet with a set of 'clues' and instructions - and off you go, filling in the answers to cryptic (sometimes very cryptic indeed) questions and directions as you go.

Last night there were four of us in a friend's car and the hunt involved an hour or so's drive along the winding back roads of Ayrshire, through the kind of countryside that Robert Burns would have known. It was a sunny night, and the countryside was looking its very best - in that wonderful time between spring and summer, when the verges are full of pink campion and a few remaining bluebells, where the hedges are creamy with sweet scented may blossom, and the gentle hillsides are ablaze with whin (gorse) blossoms. Everywhere, farmers were working hard at the silage while the weather was so congenial and the nights so long and light. It doesn't get dark till well past ten o'clock now and even at eleven there is still light in the sky.

In truth it seems very little changed in the 200+ years since Robert Burns roamed these hills and lanes with his current squeeze. It was a clear and very warm evening and it seemed as though around every corner was another stunning perspective across woods and fields, white farmhouses huddled into hillsides, and long vistas west towards the glittering sea and the hills of Arran, with Kintyre behind.

It often strikes me that the powers-that-be in Ayrshire do not know what they have in terms of scenery. If this kind of vista was anywhere else, it would be proudly promoted - the 'garden of Scotland', unspoilt landscapes of the Burns Country, and so on. I have no idea why there is, instead, a relentless focus on golf. I've no problem with golf, but there is so much more to Ayrshire and it's odd that even the people who live amid such beauty and such historical interest don't seem to notice it.

Anyway, there we were, driving slowly along yet another of the intensely pretty back roads when we passed an old farmhouse that seemed to be peculiarly sunk in time. It certainly leapt out at me and I couldn't quite say why. It wasn't part of the treasure hunt. There were no clues to be had here, and yet as we passed, I had the urge to ask our driver to stop so that I could go back, have a closer look, find out more. It just seemed ancient and interesting and for some unaccountable reason, it drew me. But, we were on a treasure hunt and we drove on.

Later, back at home (we didn't win, but we didn't do too badly either!) I followed the route we had taken on a map - not easy because we had been on a road that I didn't remember driving along before, even though I've lived here for many years - and there it was. To my amazement, I discovered that the house was Mount Oliphant. Which was the place where the Burness family moved from the cottage in Alloway where the poet was born. Rab later changed his name to Burns. It hadn't been a particularly happy place for the family - the land was, as ever with these small tenant farms, particularly bad. Landowners would rent them out and the poor tenants would be responsible for 'improving' them, often at the expense of their own health and strength. It was this kind of work in conditions much less warm and congenial than last night, that the poet described as the 'toil of a galley slave'. And so it must have been. It helped to destroy his own and his father's health.

The place is, of course, changed. But there is still something recognisable about it when you look at old pictures such as this one.

Mount Oliphant

There's something about the total immersion of researching a historical novel - which is what I've been doing for the past two or three years - that makes the researcher oddly sensitive to places. Whether it is or not, it feels supernatural.  And you find yourself meeting with slightly odd and unexpected coincidences like this one!

If you want to know more about exactly what I have been researching, you could seek out a copy of my most recent novel, The Jewel - all about the life and times of Robert Burns's Ayrshire born wife, Jean Armour. It's available in all good bookshops, as they say - and on Kindle of course, and in other eBook forms as well.

Musing About Muses

Burns House Museum, Mauchline

I've been musing on the notion of the poetic muse. I did a bit of thinking about muses in The Jewel, given that Burns is on record as describing his wife, Jean, as his muse, but later commentators seemed determined to personify his muse in other, more majestic and less domestic ways. Actually, the poet himself also described his muse as 'Coila' - the spirit of the Kyle district of Ayrshire that had nurtured him, and given that he wrote so vividly about the natural world, this is entirely understandable.

Just as an aside, one or two people at various book events, have mentioned to me how pleased they are not just that Jean has been given her due, but that for much of the novel, the poet himself is depicted in summer. Not exclusively, of course, since the novel covers many years. But it's a sunny, spring and summer book and there is a sense in which Rab was so often a sunny spring and summer poet. He wrote about winter, for sure, but it's clear that he wasn't at his best in the winter months. I reckon now he'd probably be diagnosed with Seasonal Affective Disorder!

One of my favourite Burns songs is O Were I On Parnassus Hill, here in a delightful version by Ceolbeg. 'My muse maun be thy bonnie self,' he says, of his wife. 'Then come sweet muse, inspire my lay, for all the lee lang simmer's day, I couldna sing, I couldna say, how much, how dear I love thee!'

This poem has been dismissed as a 'vapid lyric' - by a man, obviously. I've read it to largely female audiences, all of whom seem to appreciate it immensely as a 'honeymoon poem' which is exactly what the poet intended. You know, that intense feeling when you can't bear to be apart from the beloved for any length of time? But perhaps modern men prefer more stately and intellectual muses.

muse
myo͞oz
noun
(in Greek and Roman mythology) each of nine goddesses, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, who preside over the arts and sciences.
synonyms: inspiration. creative influence,  stimulus.
formal
"the poet's muse"
a woman, or a force personified as a woman, who is the source of inspiration for a creative artist.
noun: muse; plural noun: muses

Anyway, I got to thinking - what about women? I've never had a muse.  Have you? As a writer, I've had - and still do have - a very supportive husband. Before that I had a wonderfully supportive father. On the other hand, I've known men who have been downright counterproductive as sources of inspiration although female friends have sometimes inspired me. 

But I never felt the need of a muse and wouldn't know where to begin searching for one. Maybe it was a good excuse for writer's block. The man could blame the woman (or muse) for deserting him. All the fault of her indoors as usual. 

Three Common Misconceptions About Jean Armour's Husband - and the Probable Truth.

In among various conversations about The Jewel, Jean and Robert Burns, over the past few months, both with individuals and with groups, I’ve realised that three misapprehensions about the poet are still current. These are beliefs I thought had been disproved by more distinguished academics than me years ago. Let’s look at them.

So many people have repeated the judgement that Burns was a drunkard. He wasn’t but it goes back a long way. A mean spirited Dumfries draper called William Grierson attended his funeral in 1796 and wrote that the poet was ‘of too easy and accommodating a temper which often involved him in scenes of dissipation and intoxication which by slow degrees impaired his health and at last totally ruined his constitution.’

Well, he was as fond of a drink as the next man at a time when a prodigious amount of alcohol might be consumed by the gentry perhaps even more than the poor. Partly this was because in the cities at least – less so in the countryside where houses might have a well – fresh water was at a premium and it could be safer to drink ale, although ‘small ale’ contained very little alcohol. Actually, Rab was probably less inclined to overindulge in hard liquor than most, although he certainly had his moments. But when you look at the body of work he produced, alongside a vast amount of clever, entertaining, thought provoking correspondence, as well as hard physical work, first as a farmer and then as an exciseman, riding some 200 miles each week, winter and summer alike – and being a loving father to a great number of children - you can see that the occasional spree is much more likely than any persistent problem. He was a social drinker on high days and holidays. He also thought the odd ‘session’ contributed to his creativity (as perhaps it did). He was occasionally led astray by men who ought to have known better. And during his last grave illness, alcohol seems to have given him some slight relief, if only as a painkiller. But it wasn’t what killed him.

He didn’t die of the drink, and he didn’t die of consumption either. The evidence seems to point to a diagnosis of endocarditis – chronic inflammation of the heart muscle – which would certainly have been a challenge to his ‘constitution’, especially for a man involved in hard physical work in all weathers. Then, in Dumfries, he had a painful tooth abscess, and it’s now thought that the resulting massive infection, at a time when there were no antibiotics, would be enough to trigger acute endocarditis. He became gravely ill, with all the symptoms of that painful condition and died the following summer. During his last few weeks, he seems to have been able to eat nothing. Milk mixed with a little port wine was all that gave him any relief. But the ‘flying gout’ diagnosed by the doctors of the time was only a way of describing the dreadful widespread pains that beset him during his last few weeks.

Finally, I’ve been asked more than once if I thought Rab was a violent man. Well, I reckon he was a lover not a fighter. Fond of fishing, he was no fan of shooting and once took a neighbour to task for wounding a hare on the borders of his land (and wrote a scathing poem about it afterwards). He was, nevertheless, a man of significant presence, physical and intellectual. He was a better friend than an enemy and was known to threaten to ‘skewer in verse’ anyone who overstepped the mark, like the Celtic bards of old. But his reputation was always for non-violence, for tolerance and good humour and there is no evidence that he was ever violent towards any of the women with whom he was associated.

Who knows just what went on with Jean in the stable in Mauchline when the couple were, frankly, at their lowest ebb in a great many ways. Was it overwhelming passion or something verging on assault? We have Burns’s own version in a letter to a friend, bragging about a coupling he had persuaded himself Jean enjoyed as much as he did. But Rab was a chameleon and could write what he thought might most impress an individual correspondent. We would know nothing about this episode if Rab hadn’t chosen to brag about it himself. We have the fact that Jean was struggling with a mass of intractable problems not least a second unwanted pregnancy, and she went into labour very soon after the incident. But even then, she undoubtedly loved this man. The tension between desire – theirs was clearly an intense mutual physical attraction – and Jean’s obvious vulnerability presented me with some problems as a novelist. My interpretation may be slightly shocking, but I suspect it may be closer to the truth than the poet’s version. Of course we should remember at all times that we are reading and writing about an 18th century man. Laddish he may have been, but for his time, the poet’s ability to project himself into the minds of the ‘lassies’ – to defend them and appreciate them and befriend them – is one of the things that most endeared him to me when I was writing the Jewel. I suspect Jean loved him for it too.

Voices and Stories

I'm reblogging this from my March post for Authors Electric, with whom I've been blogging for some years now. Sadly, it'll be my last-but-one post for them. I've loved my time blogging with the group, and will remain in touch with everyone, but pressure of work has caught up with me and one or two commitments have to be pruned so I'm taking a sabbatical from AE. I'm hoping that it'll give me a bit more time to devote to this blog which I've been neglecting lately. I'm aiming to write a few more posts each month especially since this is shaping up to be an exciting year for me, with the publication of my new novel in May, and the paperback reprint of my history of the Isle of Gigha (now titled The Way It Was) in June, so do check in here from time to time.

But this post, all about voices and stories, seems well worth reblogging since it's something so many writers find problematic. And if writers have problems, then so do readers!

Having published The Physic Garden, a first person narration historical novel (although not my first historical novel) a couple of years ago, I then found myself contemplating the challenge of writing a new historical novel, more or less set in the same period, late 18th and early 19th century Scotland, for the same publisher.

But I knew almost immediately that this wouldn’t be a first person narration – although it could have been. I’m generally comfortable with first person narration because – wearing my other hat as a playwright – I’ve written a number of dramatic monologues: vivid first person narratives, with a strong voice and a strongly visual element too. In fact I think the key to writing a successful monologue is to cast the whole audience as another character, so that the actor is telling his or her story to the audience. I don’t mean audience participation, which can be at best surprising and at worst embarrassing. But for the audience to be engaged, they have to feel that the character is engaging with them, personally. I always liken it to the role of the wedding guest in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and in a play called The Price of a Fish Supper, I made a direct reference to the poem, with my fisherman narrator ironically aware of the poem from his schooldays and of the parallels with his own situation, his own personal albatross.

Experience of writing plays is useful for writing first person narrative fiction, since you inevitably find yourself casting the reader, whoever he or she might be, in the role of audience/listener/participant in the story of the novel, and this gives the narration an immediacy and intimacy it might otherwise lack. I think it worked well enough in The Physic Garden since by the time he was narrating the story, William Lang was an educated and experienced man – one who had become scholarly, but who was able to look back on his raw, youthful self with a measure of wisdom and understanding. The whole book was ‘about’ how he got there, the story of the harrowing events, the betrayals in his life that conspired to make him the man he turned out to be.

My new novel, The Jewel, however, is about the life and times of Jean Armour, the long-suffering wife of Scottish poet Robert Burns, and I was aware even before I began researching the subject that she had been somewhat neglected by the critical establishment, especially the Victorians, but even by those commentators who ought to have known better. In her 1930 biographical novel about the poet, Catherine Carswell was content to dismiss Jean as an illiterate and unfeeling ‘young heifer.’

I briefly considered telling the tale in Jean’s voice. Although I was born in Yorkshire, I’ve lived in Ayrshire long enough to be well aware of the vibrant language of this place, although like so many people nowadays, the poet himself seemed to find it remarkably easy to switch between Scots and what reads very much like standard English – and we’ve no reason to suppose that, with a good ear and a ready wit, he wasn’t able to do the same thing in speech, if he thought the situation and company warranted it. Jean was a different matter. Her father was a prosperous stonemason in the busy town of Mauchline: busier in the 18th century than it is today. She would have spoken – especially as a young woman – an Ayrshire version of Scots, although like William Lang, time and experience would probably have changed it somewhat. But much of the ‘meat’ of the story involves the complicated courtship of the couple, with all its ups and downs. She had a level of education, was literate but not literary. She had a fund of old songs, and knew all their melodies, passed on to her from her mother and grandmother. It was one of the things that seems to have attracted the poet. She was never foolish and emerges as a kindly, sensible, down to earth woman whose sincere affection for her frequently errant lover, later husband, is never really in any doubt. She loved him although there were clearly times when she found it hard to like him much.

I could ‘hear’ her voice in my head, just as I can hear Ayrshire Scots spoken every time I go down the street or into the nearby town for my shopping. But would it be right to attempt to reproduce it on the page? I soon decided that it would be better all round if the novel was written in the third person, but very much from Jean’s perspective. We are with Jean throughout the whole novel, but the slight remove of a third person narration allows us to see through her eyes, to feel through her feelings and to hear her voice, without introducing the undeniable hurdle for many readers of fixing the whole narrative in 18th century Scots.

I wanted and needed a wider audience. I wanted and needed to convey the story in an authentic but accessible way.

So, I was listening for cadences of speech, for the shape of conversations, and for expressions that are – to a great extent – almost as commonplace now as they were then. People still call their children ‘weans’ here rather than ‘bairns.’ Still say that they are ‘black affronted’ by something. Still tell people that their coats are hanging on a ‘shoogly peg’ when they are overstepping the mark in some way. I have heard a woman call her husband a ‘knotless threid’ – a knotless thread who might slip away at time of need. It seemed to me enough to introduce words and phrases and the shape of certain conversations to fix the novel in the particular time, but just as vitally in the place of its setting. And to attempt to avoid anachronisms as far as I could, of course. But all while making the story as comprehensible as possible to the casual, non Scottish reader. And yes, there is a small glossary, even though I’d hope everything makes sense from its context!

Incidentally, anachronisms are not always what we think them. I remember an editor questioning the phrase 'ghostly gear' in The Curiosity Cabinet. She thought it was modern. But it isn't. It's a very old word for your 'stuff'.

The other vital element in all this, though, seems to me to be story. However authentic a voice, however firmly embedded in a time and place, if that voice does not have an absorbing story to tell, then the novel – or play, or short story – will fail. It doesn’t have to have a complex plot. There doesn’t have to be a twist in the tail. But there has to be a story for those voices, for those people to tell, something that carries us forward, that makes us want to find out what happens next, that satisfies the reader’s desire for illumination, for the perception that the book is perhaps about more than the sum of its parts – but that each of those parts really matters. The love of story is one of the things that makes us human. This is true for the writer, quite as much as for the reader. Whether successfully or not, we write to find out. Or at least I know I do.

What do you think?

Physic Gardens, Gardeners and Poets

The Physic Garden is on special offer on Amazon at the moment - 99p for the eBook, and I'm not at all sure how long that is going to go on! It could go back to full price any moment, so if you're reading this and have missed the boat, apologies. Not that it's terribly expensive at full price. And because the cover is so beautiful - many thanks to Glasgow Museums for supplying my publisher, Saraband, an image of a sampler that was not only right for the novel, but pretty much right for the date too - the paperback is a lovely book as well. It's one you might be glad to have on your shelves, even if, like me, you prefer reading novels on a Kindle.

Did I really say that? Well, I'm afraid it's true. But sometimes, when I like a particular book a lot, I want to have it in both versions.

And I'm a small time collector of antiquarian books as well, so my shelves are fairly cluttered with old volumes, not even very valuable old volumes either: just extremely pre-loved.

Extremely pre-loved books.

I really do like the smell of those. I honestly don't care about the scent of new books, even my own new books. They sort of smell of paper and nothing else and so does bog roll or printer paper. But old books, very old books - oh, like old textiles, they smell of time, and the perfume of the past, and I can get quite sentimental over those.

When I was researching the Physic Garden - a book I sometimes think I ought to have called The Psychic Garden, because that's what so many people want to call it! - it struck me that my narrator/gardener/bookseller, William, of whom I'm still very fond indeed, would have known all about Robert Burns. The lives of the two would have overlapped, in terms of time although they would never have met. Burns would have died only six years before William first met his sweetheart, Jenny Caddas, taking her swarm of bees. So when William, whose narrative voice was so strong that I was never quite sure what he was going to say next, mentions Robert Burns, and the challenges he must have faced in the houses of the Edinburgh gentry, it seemed perfectly feasible. 'But then, I believe, the poet's father was a gardener too, and it was that work which first took him to Ayrshire where Rab was born,' writes William.

The cottage William Burness built. 

Much more recently, as regular readers of this blog will know, I've been finishing a new historical novel about Jean Armour, the wife of that same Robert Burns. This is no coincidence. I was already immersed in the time and place and had previously written a couple of plays about the poet, but had always wanted to write more, a lot more, about Jean.

Because the new novel, titled The Jewel, is primarily about Jean, the poet's father - also called William - only figures peripherally. He was dead by the time the family moved to Mossgiel farm outside Mauchline. He comes across in most of the biographies as a kindly father, intelligent and thoughtful but very strait-laced and rather grim. His son felt that his father was disappointed in him. Yet it struck me that William  Burness, as he signed his name, must have had some spirit of adventure as a young man. He moved from the North East where he was born, first to Edinburgh to work as a gardener, and thence to Ayrshire. Moreover, he met Agnes Broun, the poet's mother, at the fair in Maybole and married her with a certain amount of precipitation, so it must have been a whirlwind courtship! Perhaps the poet, whose chief virtue was genuine kindliness and who could be impulsive, was more like his father than he knew.

Greenside, Maybole, Ayrshire.