The Golden Fleece

by Muriel Spark

  Robert Burns was born in 1759 of a poor farming family at Alloway in Ayrshire, the eldest of seven children. Although he became in the public mind the legendary Son of the Soil, Burns was not the untutored genius that he was reported to be. His schooldays were short in years but his extraordinary intelligence made up for that. He preferred his verses to be in the Scots dialect but he could still write and speak good plain English. He studied even while helping arduously on the various farms that his father rented.

  Burns adored women. Whenever he had sex, which was often, he wrote a song about it. There was a touch of the rooster about him. He had numerous children born out of wedlock, and never denied paternity. On the contrary he loved them and did what he could to comfort the mothers. One illegitimate child was brought up by his own mother and another by his wife, Jean Armour.

  Burns made love all his adult life, joyfully, and all over the place. Any woman whom he slept with was in his eyes a jewel, a beauty. ‘My heart,’ he wrote, ‘was completely (sic) tinder, and was eternally lighted up by some Goddess or other.’ These Goddesses were all of his own peasant origin. He could not adapt his nature to what he called the ‘boarding-school’ expectations of fine young ladies. He preferred bonnie barmaids, servant girls, milkmaids and sturdy countrywomen. He advised his brother, ‘Try for intimacy as soon as you feel the first symptoms of passion.’ Eventually he married one of his first loves, Jean Armour, whose parents had once forbidden their union despite her pregnancy, only changing their minds after he was famous. By Jean he had nine children.

  After the successful publication of his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in 1785, Burns withdrew from a plan he had formed of emigration to the West Indies. His first collection of verse was an immediate success. His fame grew. He went to Edinburgh where he was duly lionised. This did, and did not, go to his head. He formed friendships with titled men, scholars and benefactresses; he fell in love all over the place, but he knew it would not last. He was made much of in the grand houses, especially fêted by two older women, Agnes McLehose who was separated from her husband, and a widow, Frances Dunlop. His relations with Agnes McLehose were not sexual due to her moral scruples, but they were very deep, and besides, it was a literary friendship since Mrs McLehose was an educated woman. With Mrs Dunlop, who was very much his senior, there grew a mother–son relationship which lasted many years until she discovered that Burns’ sympathies were with the French revolutionaries.

  It is difficult to realise that it is over 200 years since the death of Robert Burns, he was so ‘modern’ a genius, so uninhibited, full of virility, a hard drinker, bawdy, garrulous, at times self-contradictory to the point of hypocrisy, at others, too sincere for his own best interests. He could be tender and lyrical.

  In conversation Burns was said to speak clear, succinct English. In his verse and poetry he spoke mainly as a child of the soil. Much of it was unprintable in his lifetime but he distributed his merry obscenities liberally among his friends.

  You can admire Robert Burns or not as a poet, but there is really something compelling about his life. He is related fictionally to Tom Jones and is a spiritual forebear of Dylan Thomas. He was, for most of his life, a professional noble savage and peasant-genius.

  His few years reached from 1759 to 1796. He worked on his father’s tenant-farm in Ayrshire dutifully and hardily all the days of his youth. Though his schooling was haphazard and scrappy he was an ambitious and bookish young man, even while he pushed the plough.

  He praised life exceedingly, even while he cursed and swore. He fornicated freely all his life, never failing in tender feelings towards the resultant pregnant girls and illegitimate children. He went back to farming, regularised his union with Jean Armour and finally obtained a less precarious job as an exciseman, which enabled him to concentrate some of his time on his literary concerns.

  To his first child by a housemaid he addressed an ode:

  Welcome! My bonnie,

  sweet wee Dochter!

  Though ye’ve come

  here a wee unsought for…

  By the time he was twenty-three Burns seemed to think in verse. Many aspects of his personal life are recorded in those Scots vernacular rhymes which were soon to enchant the reading population of Scotland and beyond.

  Like Sir Walter Scott after him, Burns collected old Scottish airs to which he set his verses, preserving a vocal cottage cultural tradition.* One realises on hearing these songs, the difference between the merely adequate poetry of the printed versions and their loveliness when set to their music. Burns’ songs could be full of happiness or imbued with sadness. He wrote in many moods from many points of view other than his own. Some of his most successful love-songs present the girl’s point of view:

  O wha’ll mow me now, my jo,

  An wha’ll mow me now:

  The sodger with his bandoleers

  Has bang’d my belly fu.

  If this is difficult to decipher, a little imagination will serve the purpose.

  Burns had no apparent difficulty in squaring his erotic productions with his more respectable life-style. After his last visits to Edinburgh and tours of the Highlands and the Scottish Borders, he took a civil service job as befitted a steady married man. But even as an excise-inspector he never ceased to fall in love and sing love’s praises. He died at the age of 37 at his home in Dumfries in a wasted condition of an unspecified rheumatic illness; it seems that the very force and intensity of his feelings had consumed him.

  One question is left outstanding. Why did Burns set such real and earnest store by his job? One sees that he felt the need for a settled income, but why that of an exciseman whose job it was to go snooping and tax-levying throughout his district? Fascinating as this may have been to a man who liked to ride about the countryside and socialise, the job certainly does not fit in with the exultant lilt of one of Burns’ best songs, in which the exciseman is carried off by the devil. Is there not a dichotomy here between the desire for this particular occupation and Burns’ free, anarchical soul?

  [1995 & 1996]

  * To celebrate the 200th anniversary of his death, the complete songs of Robert Burns were produced on compact discs by Linn Records in association with the Burns Federation. A twelve-volume set was planned. The first of these is exquisite, the result of patient and knowledgeable research into the instruments and music to which Burns set his songs. [Muriel Spark’s note]

  Andrew Young

  Andrew Young is one of the most interesting independents of our time. As a pastoral miniaturist he resembles Robert Frost: his thrifty diction and the way he looks at domestic things recall John Crowe Ransom; Walter de la Mare comes to mind through his light and occasional archaic diction; Clare too seems represented in his Nature themes – a chastened Clare though; and the French symbolists are present at times. But for all this, Andrew Young does not write quite like anyone else, probably because he is a born artist. An artist, I mean, in the way that Chekhov is an artist, whose prose is to me the most forcible counterpart of Andrew Young’s poetry. And an artist whose uniqueness and ‘secret’ is partly founded on good taste. There must be volumes of poetry left unwritten in the whole of Young’s experience of Nature. But from this experience he has chosen to record very little, very briefly. And this little is as much and no more than his power of expression will cope with. That is, I think, his first asset – it is an asset to any poet to know that poetry is not only what you say, but how you say it, and to discover just what you are capable of saying.

  What Andrew Young has to say is that he has seen the multifarious worlds of Nature from their side of experience. Unlike Wordsworth, of whom Nature was a projection, Andrew Young seems to know what it is like to be a mole, a hill, a thunderstorm. He does not speak as one identified with them – his poetry is not pantheistic – but as one who has been their guest. The way in which he conveys this attitude is very skilful. He speaks of Nature’s otherness, in terms of its own reckonings, as a traveller might of the
strange customs and conceptions of an alien people. This is how time appears in the world of an ancient tree, as Andrew Young sees it:

  One elbow on the sloping earth it leans,

  That steeply falls beneath,

  As though resting a century it means

  To take a moment’s breath.

  And on a dead mole, the poet reflects:

  For you to raise a mound

  Was as for us to make a hole,

  What wonder now that being dead

  Your body lies here stout and square

  Buried within the blue vault of the air?

  Examining Young’s method more closely, one finds repeatedly a kind of riddle-imagery which makes its impact a fraction later than the literal meaning. The missel thrush, looking down into a pool of water, sees the poet ‘Crawl at the bottom of the air’. The poet revisits a scene after many years, and as he stares into the water each reflection, even his own, seems unchanged, until he remarks his hair touched with white. But he does not say it like that. He says it from the point of view of the water, in this riddle-language of his:

  Although I notice that my hair

  Now stirs a little foam in the smooth bay.

  This type of imagery shows the freshness of the poet’s vision. We are familiar with the fact that dandelions are orange-coloured, but the statement:

  … dandelions flood

  The orchard as though apple-trees

  Dropped in the grass ripe oranges

  invests the fact with strangeness and beauty. Because such a technique is so personal a part of Young’s vision, he is not to be imitated.

  [1950/51]

  Giacomo Manzù

  The Italian sculptor Giacomo Manzù was born at Bergamo, north-east of Milan, in 1908. Like all great artists, somehow he was born with a past, and he will die with a future.

  Manzù’s destiny touched on that of another man from Bergamo: Pope John XXIII, one of the two men with whom Manzù has been profoundly impressed (the other was Pablo Picasso). Manzù, like Pope John Roncalli twenty-seven years previously, was born into a poor and numerous family. Square-built and solid, he bears a resemblance to John XXIII whose portrait he was later to do in bronze, and under whose care he finally achieved the splendid Doors of St Peter’s in Rome.

  At the age of eleven, already with a passion for plastic art, Manzù was apprenticed to a wood-carver. From there he proceeded to work with a gilder, then a plaster-decorator. He modelled and drew in his spare time. He had an undeniable calling. At the age of thirteen Manzù attended an evening school of the decorative arts. His life as a sculptor, at first untaught, and with little experience of sculptural traditions, began when he was twenty. His great advantage was to be born of a nation endowed with a sense of its own immense artistic patrimony.

  Manzù’s work weathered the political furies of the ’twenties and ’thirties under Mussolini’s fascist regime. One can well believe that, as he claims, neither the church nor the state had any influence on his work. Those were days when the social realism of the dictatorship stamped its hideous heroic rhetoric on sculpture particularly, grandiosely bewildering the masses.

  Manzù’s work gradually reflects an artist’s experimental acceptance, rejection and assimilation of current movements, but in the late 1930s his unique potency with materials and his vitality began to be nationally recognised. The sculptor who impressed him most was, he said, Brancusi.

  One feels, with Manzù, that the art has chosen the artist. He troubles definition. He has certain recurrent themes. Although he seldom makes more than one example from a cast, and never a series, he works back on ever-more interesting, and in most cases simplified, versions of figures and designs he made in his early years, even his boyhood.

  The main recurrent themes are: a girl on a chair; still-life compositions on a chair; female busts and forms; the cardinals and religious figures interpreted humanistically, as in the bronze doors of the Basilica of St Peter’s in Rome, Salzburg Cathedral, and the Church of St Laurenz, Rotterdam.

  The girl on a chair: In Manzù’s house there is a small, slightly frayed straw-seated cottage chair attached to the wall; it obviously had a near-mystical significance for the artist. In 1930 he began his first drawings of a girl on the verge of adolescence seated on the chair, and made his first sculpture in 1934. He returned to the theme, with other versions, after the war, when he began to gain an international reputation. ‘By an uncontrollable impulse of emotion I united the two things’, he has said, ‘the chair, – the sole inheritance I received from my father – and the young girl. It was the first time I had seen a young girl naked, and I wanted to place her on a throne, like the most precious thing I had, in this way uniting my two treasures in one. I was convinced at that time that for the rest of my life I would never make anything else but that girl on that chair.’

  When Manzù was asked if he thought the girl on the chair series was his best, he thought awhile, then said, ‘Yes, I think so.’ They are indeed wonderful and spare compositions of spatial form, in the mature versions gaining certitude and sincerity. (The critic Cesare Brandi has made the point that Manzù progresses not from naturalness but towards it.) The chair features in another series of bronzes completed in the mid-sixties and seventies. Fruit, draperies and crayfish, branches of vine and pear tree, are deposited like harvest offerings on the sublime rough-hewn chair, with its felicitous cubic effects of cross-bars and legs.

  ‘The theme of women,’ said Manzù, ‘is what I always return to. Women are most important to me.’ It is true that his female forms greatly outnumber the male figures. In 1954 he first encountered his life-companion Inge Schabel. The portraits of Inge recur in impressive variety, egg-shaped, majestic, serene. They are an achievement of stillness and light, eliminating everything around them. (Inge is beautiful, more tender and mobile in real life than in her timeless portraits.)

  Manzù has said very little about his own work. ‘To write would be arrogance’, he said. But his brief comments are always pertinent. He was struck, as a child, by the shape of a Bishop rather than by the Bishop himself. ‘My parents were religious and we were often in church. I remember the shape…’ Later, as he pursued this theme to its culmination in the Cardinal series, he felt he could go on repeating variants of those standing cardinals and seated cardinals, confined in their copes, with all their geometric and restrained grandeur; but he stopped: ‘I didn’t want to academise myself’.

  Manzù’s innate and poetic psychological sense always informs both the conception of his themes and the actual composition. Among the variants of the David series, going back to 1938, David is depicted crouched on a stupendous mill-stone, like a street-boy with a foetus-like face, reaching for his defiant missile, the King of Israel in embryo.

  The great bronze doors of St Peter’s, so well-known to visitors from all over the world, were first suggested in 1947. A sculpture competition was set up. It was not till 1952 that Manzù received the official commission. The theme first required by the Curia was ‘Triumph of the Saints and the Martyrs of the Church’. It is thanks to the supreme intelligence of John XXIII who, perceiving that Manzù could not live with these theological and iconographical set themes, accepted those natural to Manzù’s genius. Manzù had by this time lost his faith in the Church, but the Pope had faith in Manzù and the spirituality he brought to the harmonious bas-reliefs. They depict death in a variety of legendary forms, but they rejoice even while they despair.

  Manzù died in 1991. Spirituality was one of Manzù’s most-valued qualities; to him it signified fervour, love, energy, and the inward life-force. But he was also extremely concrete in the execution of his ideas. His cardinals tell us something about cardinals, his children about children, his lovers about lovers. The variant bronze Lovers of 1966, 1977 and 1978 are almost mobile in their rhythm and exuberant baroque swirl. The orgiastic expression of the lovers brings to mind Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome. T
hey are spirit and matter combined.

  Manzù has done important scenography, paintings in watercolour and oils, drawings, book illustrations, jewellery. He worked long hours. He said without hesitation that he dominated his material. Mention the word ebony, and his face lit up: ‘…it has like blood in its veins’. His only boast was, ‘Conosco mio mestiere’ (I know my trade).

  [1988]

  The Desegregation of Art

  The Blashfield Address to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York

  You know that I speak as a writer. And when I claim, also, to speak from the point of view of an artist, this is not to attach value or quality to what I write but because, rightly or wrongly, I think as an artist, I live as one, I have never from my earliest memories known any other life or way of seeing things but that of an artist, a changer of actuality into something else. You must know that I am not a thinker by profession but that, for me, ideas are inseparable from words or from any other material that the artist works with. This fact is my only qualification for addressing you at all and it is only right to declare myself for what I am, so that you will know more or less the limitations as well as the scope of my point of view.