Marilyn Butler is Rector of Exeter College, Oxford. She is the author of Jane Austen and the War of Ideas and of Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries.
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Vol. 18 No. 3 · 8 February 1996
pages 9-10 | 3013 words
Malvolio’s Story
Marilyn Butler
- Dirt and Deity: A Life of Robert Burns by Ian McIntyre
HarperCollins, 461 pp, £20.00, October 1995, ISBN 0 00 215964 3
In ‘Resolution and Independence’, that great but mysterious poem, Wordsworth describes himself walking out on a moist, brilliant May morning. He is about to experience one of the numinous encounters for which he is famous – with another solitary walker, a derelict old man who makes his living gathering leeches from moorland ponds. Before that, his pleasure in the beauty of nature darkens when he remembers how other poets, young and strong, were reduced to wretchedness while still in their prime:
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Letters
Vol. 18 No. 5 · 7 March 1996
From John Carswell
I was naturally interested in Marilyn Butler’s review of Ian McIntyre’s Dirt and Deity: A Life of Robert Burns (LRB, 8 February), in which she says some very nice things about my mother Catherine Carswell’s book on the subject and defends her against McIntyre’s aspersions, some of which seem to me to betray a puzzling animus. (‘Quite rudely’ is Marilyn Butler’s phrase for the way he treats her work.) McIntyre’s references to Catherine Carswell are surprisingly frequent, and some of them are just, even appreciative; but some have the character I have mentioned. For instance, where does he get the idea that she was ‘the daughter of a shipping magnate’? Her father was a middling businessman in the import-export line who lived with his family of four, a cook and a maid not far from Sauchiehall St, where he daily walked to his office. It is all in print. Her inheritance was small, she lived all her life in financial difficulty and died penniless. But why drag in her parentage except to hint that wealth (though mistakenly assumed) confers only amateur status? His remark that her book was ‘written in the more politically conscious Thirties’ contradicts not only fact but his own text, which elsewhere gives 1930 as the date of publication. The book was written in the later Twenties. This is the kind of slip that betrays animus.
Incidentally, where did McIntyre get the idea that Burns’s landlord, Patrick Miller of Dalswinton, ‘put money into the construction of a catamaran with hand-driven paddles’? Odd for a banker. They were driven by steam, which is why there are claims that Miller was the first man to apply steam to navigation.
John Carswell
London NW3
