Auld Acquaintance

SELECTED LETTERS OF ROBERT BURNS (371 pp.)--Edited by DeLancey Ferguson--Oxford ($1.25).

"Do you think that the sober, ginhorse routine of existence could inspire a man with life, & love, & joy--could fire him with enthusiasm, or melt him with pathos. . . ? No! No! Whenever I want to be more than ordinary in song ... do you imagine I fast & pray for the celestial emanation? Tout au contraire! I have a glorious recipe ... I put myself on a regimen of admiring a fine woman."

Robert Burns followed his regimen so strenuously that at his death in 1796, he was known not only as Caledonia's bard but as the Scottish Casanova. Popular legend made him a victim of wine, women and song. Less censorious, and more in accord with modern views, Byron saw Burns forever riding the pendulum of a split personality: "Sentiment, sensuality, soaring and groveling, dirt and deity." Some of the best evidence for and against Burns the man--his robust, personable letters--has been sifted for the first time in two decades by a Brooklyn College English professor, DeLancey Ferguson, in an apt selection that suggests that Byron was right.

"Burn This Letter." By his own admission a devotee of "Love and Poesy" from the age of 15, Burns was in his mid-20s when he developed "a wishing eye to that inestimable blessing, a wife. My mouth watered deliciously to see a young fellow, after a few idle, commonplace stories from a gentleman in black, strip & go to bed with a young girl, & no one durst say black was his eye; while I, for just doing the same thing, only wanting that ceremony, am made a Sunday's laughingstock, & abused like a pickpocket." The abuse came from the parents of a master mason's daughter named Jean Armour, with whom Burns "had got deeply in love ... of which proofs were every day arising more & more to view. I would gladly have covered my Inamorata from the darts of Calumny with the conjugal Shield."

But Jean's parents, while taking a dim view of a pregnant daughter, took an even dimmer one of the fledgling poet, and said no to a marriage. Fuming with hurt pride, Burns delivered a round, ranting curse on Mrs. Armour to a friend: "May all the Furies . . . await the old harridan . . . May Hell string the arm of Death to throw the fatal dart, and . . . rouse the infernal flames to welcome her approach!" Then he added cautiously: "For Heaven's sake, burn this letter," as if suspecting that within two years she would be his mother-in-law.

A Touch of Robin Hood. In the meantime, the success of his first book of poems salved his ego without going to his head: "When I read [Virgil's] Georgics, and then survey my own powers, 'tis like the idea of a Shetland Pony, drawn up by the side of a thoroughbred Hunter." He attracted patrons but he rarely kowtowed to them, feeling that it was a common hypocrisy with poets, "when their Patrons try their hand at a Rhyme, to cry up the Honorable or Right Honorable performance as Matchless, Divine, etc."

Burns made Jean Armour a mother again, and this time her parents were only too eager to insist on a match. In the spring of 1788 they were married, but they did not live happily ever after. For one thing, Burns had reservations about the earthiness of his Jean: "Mrs. Burns is getting stout again, & laid as lustily about her today at breakfast as a Reaper from the corn-ridge."

Yet he tried to be a dutiful husband and father. He put his royalties into a farm, but he could not put his back and heart into it. With an eye on his hungry family and an ear to the creditor's knock, he took the odiously regarded job of exciseman, but gave it a Robin Hood touch: "I recorded every Defaulter, but at the Court, I myself begged off every poor body that was unable to pay, which seeming candour gave me so much implicit credit with the Hon. Bench that . . . they gave me ample vengeance on the rest."

"Drunk--at Your Service." A rheumatic heart, debts and family deaths led him to quench his melancholy in drink. "I have been in a dilemma, either to get drunk to forget these miseries, or to hang myself ... I, of two evils, have chosen the least, & am very drunk--at your service!"

He lived to see even his fame turn to the ashes of parody: "My success has encouraged such a shoal of ill-spawned monsters to crawl into public notice, under the title of Scots Poets, that the very term, Scots Poetry, borders on the burlesque." When his excise pay "was cut, Burns went to bed with a fever, and on July 12, 1796, begged -L-10 of a cousin: "A rascal of a Haberdasher to whom I owe a considerable bill . . . has commenced a process against me . . . O, James! . . . Save me from the horrors of a jail!" Within a fortnight, and before the ten-pound check or the haberdasher, death came, at 37, to Robert Burns.

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