Eric Linklater: The Merry Muse

[shewhomust]

I read a lot while I was on holiday - and didn't write much. I posted here, and I sent a few postcards, but I didn't touch the books diary. So The Merry Muse isn't holiday reading, despite the Orcadian connection. And I don't remember where I acquired this copy, though it may possibly have been in the secondhand bookshop in Kirkwall.

Eric Linklater's The Wind on the Moon was one of the books of my childhood, one of those I could always re-read, and was always delighted to discover someone else shared. This Bookslut review won't tell you why, and I have no idea whether I would now share its reservations. Not necessarily: "an author [more] in love with the sound of his voice" wouldn't necessarily put me off. But I must, certainly, have regarded The Wind on the Moon as a one-off, because I didn't (until now) make the transition to Linklater's adult novels. There was a time when every other charity shop had a copy of Juan in America, but I never bought one, and haven't seen it in years. I don't know why I weakened and bought The Merry Muse: for the cover, perhaps, which I like very much.

This preamble to explain how I came to be reading a novel published in 1959 about which I had no preconceptions at all.

It begins: "Bifurcated, faintly pink, and silver furred, the massive body lay, contented and relaxed in green, pine-scented water, while a complacent mind shuffled and dealt its happy memories of the day before." I rather liked that, the slightly disconnected description, the leisurely introduction of the character, but gradually, uneasily, I realised that I didn't like the character. As the very first sentence suggests, Maxwell Arbuthnot is altogether too pleased with himself. The book is a comedy, of course (the jacket flap tells you so, but I don't read jacket copy if I can help it; it's liable to tell me things that I want to find out for myself - and this one does) and I'm not entirely sound on comedy: I'm reluctant to excuse crude characterisation or sloppy plotting just because the author was contructing a joke. Is that the issue here? Not really... The jacket flap also declares that "Linklater has created no more remarkable a [sic] character [...than Max Arbuthnot]" and I'm not so sure about that: his imperturbably high opinion of himself, and how little he feels he has to do to earn it, make him not so much a human character as some sort of giant puppet, larger than life but more simple.

THe plot, as you might have deduced from the title (if you knew more about Robert Burns than I do) concerns a copy of Burns' collection of bawdy verse The Merry Muses. This is literally a 'collection': the book contains material gathered by Burns from elsewhere, as well as his own compositions. But the copy which falls into Max Arbuthnot's hands also contains sixteen pages of manuscript, and the poems on these pages are undeniably the work of Burns, and, unlike the printed matter, some of his finest work. And it's this little book that sets the plot moving, the book itself as an object of substantial financial value, and its contents as poetry of shocking impropriety and startling power. There is something about this set-up - the wild card, the cat among the pigeons, the disruption it causes in comfortably middle class circles - which reminds me of Iris Murdoch's early novels, written about the same time (yes, it's a superficial reading of Murdoch - but I wonder whether she ever did write about Edinburgh?).

The poetry gets loose - that is, copies are made of the hitherto unknown poems, and these go viral - with strange effect upon the city: Edinburgh becomes"infected by a Dionysiac frenzy". Everywhere people are dancing, and singing, and pairing off - and buying old-fashioned love poetry. Love is in the air. The narrative explicitly denies, however, that a crown of young women had rounded up "a large flock of young men of curious habit - of habit unknown to the majority, but judged inimical to their pleasure by the aggressive young women" and escorted them onto an express train leaving for London. I don't know whether to regret that the general spirit of love and indulgence should show itself so intolerant, or to be impressed that a novel published in 1959 should feel that the existence of these young men should not be ignored. Perhaps Linklater doesn't know either, and that's why he wraps this section up in repeated denials.

There's a melancholy strand in the novel, too, in the poet Hector Macrae, who published in Gaelic poetry written during the war, and is now adrift, ainless, scarred by his experiences and with nothing left to say. Though even this tragic figure is not handled sadly: he is widely referred to - in the English speaker's loose approximation of his Gaelic name, Eachain Dubh, Black Hector - as Yacky Doo.

The Merry Muse shows the marks of its time; of course it does, novels do. But there is a lightness about it, even when it is sad, and I enjoyed reading it.