The Bawdy Scot

THE MERRY MUSES OF CALEDONIA by Robert Burns, edited by James Barke, Sydney Goodsir Smith, J. Delancey Ferguson. 224 pages. Putnam. $5.

The literary underworld abounds with stories about great writers who were also great pornographers. Mark Twain amused himself and friends with outhouse humor; so did Benjamin Franklin. Passages of Swift are brutally obscene. Byron and Swinburne both dipped their pens in blue ink, while even Thackeray could line out a lickerish limerick. Perhaps the most famous respectable smutmaster is Robert Burns, whose collection of bawdy Scottish verse has been circulating in more or less clandestine versions for more than 150 years. The collection as now published is as close to the original as scholarship is likely to achieve, bar ring the rediscovery of Burns's' own notebook.

Burns liked earthy humor for its own sake, and he transcribed in abundance the scabrous folk songs he heard from his countrymen, added more that he composed himself. But also, as The Merry Muses makes startlingly clear, he scrubbed and reworked some of these materials to create some of his most famous poems. One such poem with a bawdy original is Comin' Thro' the Rye, in which a much earthier verb appears in the line: "Gin a body kiss a body/ Need a body cry." Another ballad, John Anderson, My Jo, is known to every schoolboy as a touching tribute to the strength of marital affection in old age: its source, doubtless known to every schoolboy in all Scotland, turns out to be a ballad where the old wife mocks the decline of her old husband's sexual powers.

The book also offers a few poems interesting in themselves, a couple of rousing drinking songs, some Rabelaisian belly laughs, and one or two tenderly erotic lyrics. Otherwise the reader who is not a hard-core enthusiast will find the collection disappointing. The scholarly apparatus smothers the poems. What is worse for the prurient reader, Burns's Scottish dialect, which he usually trimmed to understandable proportions in his published work, is here often incomprehensible--even the dirty words.

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