Return of Rantin' Rab

THE MERRY MUSE (317 pp.)--Eric Linklater--Harcourt, Brace ($3.95).

"Hand off your hands, young man,"

she said,

"And dinna sae uncivil be;

Gif ye hae onie hive for me,

0, wrang na my virginitie!"

. . . Upon the morrow, when we raise,

I thank'd her for her courtesie,

But ay she blush'd, and ay she sigh'd,

And said:--"Alas, ye've ruin'd me!"

--The Lass That Made the Bed

This sly threnody to the dead innocence of an innkeeper's daughter is as randy as Editors W. E. Henley and T. F. Henderson allowed Robert Burns to be in the magnificent 1896-97 centenary edition of the poet's work. But Rantin' Rab enjoyed writing of houghmagandy (bed games) as much as he liked baiting the kirk, as he made plain in such poems as The Court of Equity and The Fornicator, which are usually found in the sort of editions that are passed around privately. In his new comic novel, Scots Author Linklater has done his best to lift the quarantine.

His fictional device is 16 pages of gamy verses, supposedly in Burns's own handwriting and sewn into a copy of The Merry Muses of Caledonia (the notorious anthology that the poet made to amuse his drinking companions). Max Arbuthnot, a goatish old Edinburgh lawyer with a fondness for '27 port and women of about the same vintage, undertakes to sell the smoldering and hitherto unknown holograph for his impoverished sister. He shows it to a fey, gloomy poet nicknamed Yacky Doo, who amuses himself alternately with a beckoning death wish and with Arbuthnot's married daughter.

But the daughter has a lover's quarrel with Yacky Doo. Pettishly she steals the priceless Burns manuscript, then gets drunk and loses it--or so it appears. Soon, throughout Edinburgh, copies of the verses are falling like fig leaves. The barometer of conventional morality falls dangerously too. Everyone burns but few marry; Arbuthnot himself corners a young wench in his office, and clerks on the floor below watch anxiously as plaster flakes off the ceiling.

While most of this yarn is expertly comical, Linklater's Scots satire does not sustain the brilliance of, say, Honor Tracy's jape at the Irish, The Straight and Narrow Path. Too many other elements (including Yacky Doo's mawkish death) intrude on the story's essential mixture of fondness and malice. But Author Linklater's entertainment survives its flaws. His most effective jest is at the expense of the reader who, eager to read the imaginary Burns erotica, leafs ahead to find some. The novel is salted with verses, but most of them are Scots hymns.

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