JUST as the Bible has a verse for any speaker to hang a peg on, so Robert Burns has a poem or song for like purpose. Fellow distinguished poet Liz Lochhead (“Burns ‘sex pest’ row,” The Herald January 15) is not the first female literary figure to have a square go at the Bard.
Catherine Carswell (nee Macfarlane) wrote probably the best unvarnished biography of Burns in 1930. She was castigated by the Burns fraternity for her candid appraisal which offended delicate minds of the time, including, no doubt, her Free Church parents who were pillars of the Glasgow merchant class.
I have a newspaper cutting which quotes the Observer’s noted critic JC Squires on Carswell’s “debunking Life of Robert Burns”.
“I doubt if there is a word of which Mrs Carswell is afraid. Mrs Carswell does not care twopence for decorum. Anything she thinks she says, and whenever she comes across a spade, she gives it its name without circumlocution.
“Spades must occur frequently in any life of Robert Burns. Occasionally the shovel comes down upon the reader’s head.”
The then Glasgow Herald shared the morality of the day by firing Mrs Carswell after her review of DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow. She later wrote a biography of the author and shared much of his Bohemian outlook.
She dedicated her book on Burns to DH Lawrence and her husband Donald, who had also worked for The Glasgow Herald, both of whom helped with her magnum opus.
So, congratulations to the former Makar on following Mrs Carswell’s example in avoiding the blind worship of hagiographers. Burns would have admired her spirit, just as I am sure she admires much of his work.
George Downie,
3 Summerhill Avenue, Larkhall.
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