Robert Burns once wrote ironically that “you can expect henceforth to see my birthday inserted among the wonderful events in the Almanac”, but even he can hardly have expected that it would become (uniquely among British poets as far as I know) the occasion for the performance of the same recognised ritual on every continent. Chief among the rituals at a Burns supper is a speech to the Immortal Memory of the poet, and in this book we find an anthology of substantial extracts from some of the more remarkable ones. No more appropriate editor than John Cairney could be imagined, given that his whole career has been dominated by performances of his one‐man show on Burns, to the extent that he called his autobiography The Man Who Played Robert Burns. It may be added that the publishers took their name from that of Burns’s dog.
Many famous people have been called upon in the last 200 years to deliver the Immortal Memory. From those included, we may single out Edwin Muir and Hugh MacDiarmid, two of Burns’s most distinguished successors in Scottish poetry, and the former Prime Minister Lord Rosbery. On the hundredth anniversary of the poet’s death, Rosbery gave a lengthy masterpiece of Victorian oratory in Dumfries and immediately departed by train to give another in Glasgow. Even at the time speakers were already commenting on the difficulty of saying anything about Burns that had not been said before: but they have continued to try. In less sophisticated hands than those mentioned, the result has often been what Charles Dickens, with his usual perspicacity, described as “Burns as a Hat‐Peg”. So multi‐faceted was his character that orators of all persuasions could usually find some point on which he agreed with their opinions. Burns has thus been depicted as Unionist and Nationalist, democrat and Communist, Christian and skeptic. From the first, there has been a temptation for speakers to deliver the Immortal Memory in verse, seldom equal, either in poetical or linguistic merit, to the Bard’s.
This book is no mere catalogue of speeches, but also provides a useful history of the Burns Cult which, only 15 years after the poet’s death, was already being described as “Burnsomania”, and which has, paradoxically, been criticised by many of the speakers quoted therein. By 1996 there was even a serious proposal for a Burns Industry. Along the way is included much miscellaneous Burnsian information, such as particulars of the poet’s family, the claim to accuracy of his various portraits and the fact that every Carnegie Library had to display a bust of Burns. At the end appear guidance to the conduct of a Burns Supper (as issued by the Burns Federation), some advice on delivering the Immortal Memory by the editor and a short selective bibliography of biographical and critical works. The book will surely be in demand wherever a library has a large enough clientele of resident or expatriate Scots. To leave the last word to the Bard himself:
There’s wit there, ye’ll get there
Ye’ll find nae other where.
