venerdì 1 ottobre 2010

Shelley's social network

FROM SUNDAY TIMES
Young Romantics, both famous and forgotten, in the ‘realms of ink and reality’Oliver Herford Previously undiscovered manuscript material from the New York Public Library’s Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle is coincidentally central to both of these books, which propose in their quite different ways to redraw and expand the circle of what is known about Romantic literary sociability. In doing so, both raise questions about the relation of literature to the private conduct – and daily writing – of a life, and the significance that relation might have for biography and biographical criticism.

Daisy Hay’s multiple biography Young Romantics traces the relationships within and between two second-generation Romantic groupings, one composed around Percy Shelley and the other around the poet, journalist and campaigning editor Leigh Hunt. While Hunt is not famous enough to be named in the book’s subtitle, he is more important than Byron to its organization and its argument; indeed Byron was a fitful, uncommitted member of two circles that defined themselves as circles self-consciously and on principle. Drawing on recent academic work on the political significance of literary groups in this period, Hay uncovers the links between Hunt’s “Cockney School” and the Godwinian experiment in communal living undertaken by the Shelleys. The category of “sociability” matters in these contexts, she argues, as a form of opposition to repressive government – as when Hunt presided over a literary coterie from his cell in Horsemonger Lane Gaol during a two-year imprisonment (from 1813) for a seditious libel on the Prince Regent; or again, as an exemplary critique of corrupt social and religious institutions – as in the case of Shelley’s separating from his wife and children in 1814 to form a community of enlightened exiles with Mary Godwin and her stepsister Jane Clairmont.

Some of the claims Hay makes for her writers’ pre-eminence and originality in this connection are overstated: for instance, to argue that “Creativity for the first generation of Romantic poets was inherently solitary” is to ignore the collaborations and friendly interactions of (among others) Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, and William and Dorothy Wordsworth. And the cost of the book’s targeting a comparatively popular biographical readership is that Hay must leave unexplained in literary-critical terms how exactly her writers’ sociable affiliations and participations affected their work: for the most part, a condition of productive influence amounting to “co-operative creativity” is asserted without detailed comment. Especially on the Godwin–Shelley side of things, the biographical story she tells is well-known; but she manages the strands of her narrative adroitly, and quotes generously from her characters’ letters, journals and reminiscences.

Her most compelling archival discovery is an undated autobiographical fragment by Claire Clairmont (as Jane called herself from 1815 onwards). This “memoir” constitutes a furious retrospective attack on the Godwinian critique of marriage articulated in Shelley’s notes to Queen Mab (1813) and haphazardly lived out – tested to destruction – by the young people of that group between 1814 and 1822. “Love is free”, the nineteen-year-old Shelley had written: “to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed: such a vow, in both cases, excludes us from all inquiry”. Clairmont writes as an indignant witness to the practical results of that “inquiry”: “how it abused affections that should be the solace and balm of life, into a destroying scourge . . . how the worshippers of free love not only preyed upon one another, but preyed equally upon their own individual selves turning their existence into a perfect hell”. And of course, as a beguiled and betrayed participant:

"Under the influence of the doctrine and belief of free love I saw the two first poets of England . . . become monsters of lying, meanness cruelty and treachery – under the influence of free love Lord B became a human tyger slaking his thirst for inflicting pain upon defenceless women who under the influence of free love . . . loved him."

That is not quite right about Byron, who sought no ideological justification for accepting Clairmont’s advances in the spring of 1816 and making her pregnant; but it gives a poignant glimpse of Clairmont herself (only seventeen when the affair began), who had acted just as much under the GodwinianShelleyan philosophical influence as under Byron’s personal spell.

As Hay acknowledges, Clairmont’s memoir “appears to show that the visions of her Romantic contemporaries were illusory, naive and damaging”; as one would expect, the damage in both circles was sustained above all by the girls and women. Some of the most interesting material in Young Romantics concerns Elizabeth Kent, the younger sister of Hunt’s wife Marianne, who lived with the family, evidently loved Hunt and helped him to run his journal The Examiner, and whose suicide attempt in February 1817 echoed – and may have emulated – two recent suicides of young women who had become miserably tangential to the Shelley circle, those of Mary’s half-sister Fanny Wollstonecraft Imlay in October 1816 and Shelley’s first wife Harriet Westbrook in December 1816. Kent survived and subsequently achieved a measure of independence, publishing two successful literary-botanical works and conducting an epistolary friendship with John Clare. But the unhappiness generated by Hunt’s blithely selfish reliance on both Kent sisters is wholly congruous with the tenor of personal relations among the much unluckier Shelleys. Again and again, in the records of both groups, one is confronted with an appalling lack of care – for spouses, lovers, children, friends, patrons and colleagues. It is hard to take seriously a progressive ideology of “sociability” that can not only issue in such behaviour, but also ignore the inconsistency. The disappointingly banal conclusion Daisy Hay draws from these “tangled lives” – “that relationships with other people can simultaneously be a source of great strength and unknowable pain” – recasts a specific problem about the bearings of sociable practice on Romantic political-philosophical theory as a popular biographical commonplace.

That difficult relation finds a mirror image in another important consideration for literary biographers and biographically minded critics, the relation of literature to private and quotidian forms of writing – letters above all. Hay writes of Leigh Hunt’s annual The Literary Pocket-Book (1818–23):

"Part-diary, part-anthology, these books contained work by Hunt, Shelley, Keats, Cowden Clarke and other poets who once formed part of his Hampstead set. The irony was that the group was stronger in the realms of ink and the imagination than it was in reality. The Cockney School finally attained solidity and coherence through the ephemera of newsprint and anthologies. But even as it became a powerful literary ideal, the relationship of its founding members remained strained and difficult."

There is perhaps a greater irony in writing or behaving as though the literary enactment of sociability (“the realms of ink and the imagination”) and its manifestation in a group’s daily conduct (“reality”) could be treated as separate without fatally compromising the “ideal” the group was founded on. By the greatest possible contrast, the sociable collocation of Keats and Charles Cowden Clarke – a friend and supporter from the poet’s schooldays – seems to have caused a line from one of Keats’s most famous poems to swim into Daisy Hay’s prose in this passage: “Much have I travelled in the realms of gold”. Keats composed the sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” after sitting up all night in Cowden Clarke’s London lodgings, reading with him in a borrowed 1616 folio edition of George Chapman’s translation. Cowden Clarke recalls the occasion and its immediate sequel in his memoir Recollections of Writers (1878):

"Chapman supplied us with many an after-treat; but it was in the teeming wonderment of this his first introduction, that, when I came down to breakfast the next morning, I found upon my table a letter with no other enclosure than his famous sonnet, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” We had parted, as I have already said, at day-spring, yet he contrived that I should receive the poem from a distance of, may be, two miles by ten o’clock."

Keats’s “wonderment” – refigured in the sonnet’s sestet – does not preclude a grateful sensitivity to what Cowden Clarke’s feelings might be on receipt of that letter, with its astonishing “enclosure”:

"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific – and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

By sending the sonnet in a letter, Keats causes it to function partly as a letter. The imagined expanses of sky and ocean are thus enclosed and contained within the manageable urban distance between himself and his friend: “may be, two miles”, the two miles that Keats had just walked over on his way from Clerkenwell to the Borough (composing as he went), a distance that he could negotiate easily enough by finding a courier rather early in the morning to perform the journey in reverse. In realizing that contrivance he looks to his friend as well as past him and beyond him – eagle-eyed, into the future of his own genius. Cowden Clarke recalls that on introducing Keats to an especially wonderful passage in the Odyssey, “I had the reward of one of his delighted stares”: gloriously unlike Cortez’s stare of discovery (which leaves his men to their own surmises), Keats’s “delighted stares” are the rewards of his friendship, and manifest an impulse of gratitude that is at the heart of all his amicable relations.

As an instance of conduct that draws on some of the resources of literature, a letter very ordinarily spans and mediates between “the realms of ink and the imagination” and the realms of social “reality”; so too do many other behaviours (“ephemera” in another sense than the one that applies to “newsprint and anthologies”) that may count for a biographer. Joseph Severn, who accompanied Keats to Italy in September 1820 and nursed him in his last illness at Rome, describes the exertions Keats made on their voyage to cheer a fellow passenger, a young woman suffering like himself from consumption: “and in a short time with Keats backing me with his golden jokes in support of my tinsel . . . we recoverd Miss Cottrell – to laugh and be herself” (Severn to William Haslam, September 21, 1820). Those jokes – sociable, solicitous inventions – belong securely “in the realms of gold”, like all Keats’s best actions.

If Clairmont’s autobiographical fragment accuses Shelley and Byron of monstrously bad conduct (“lying, meanness cruelty and treachery”), the new-found manuscript material at the heart of Richard Marggraf Turley’s consistently stimulating and rewarding book Bright Stars constitutes a piece of conduct that is notable for its unobtrusive goodness. It is a letter from the poet Bryan Waller Procter, who published as “Barry Cornwall”, to the editor of the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany about a review of Keats’s Endymion (1818) and Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems that appeared in two instalments in August and October 1820. “I return you the Critique on Keats as it stood”, Procter writes; “– I have spoken I think quite well enough of his book – I was fearful when I sent it off that I had not.” He is sending back a parcel of proofs, reassured on a second view of the article that he has done his best. Marggraf Turley argues that in writing this review, Procter took a “guiding hand in repairing [Keats’s] fortunes” with the critics, giving an “authoritative lead” to other reviewers to speak well of the Lamia volume – too late to repair Keats’s personal fortunes, given the state of his health in autumn 1820, but still a substantial and influential act of justice.

Around his discovery that Procter was the author of the unsigned Edinburgh Magazine review, Marggraf Turley has assembled a minutely documented and splendidly suggestive study of these writers’ interactions in the poetic marketplace. Like Keats, “Barry Cornwall” was a protégé of Leigh Hunt, but he was not punished for that association as Keats was by the Tory reviews. Starting a couple of years after Keats, he very quickly became popular on a scale that Keats never remotely attained, with a visibility comparable to that of Byron or Felicia Hemans. He often sounds a bit like bad Keats (Marggraf Turley notes that in 1883 Keats’s Victorian editor Harry Buxton Forman misidentified a poem by Cornwall as a rejected fragment of Endymion), and the undeniably “Keatsian” themes of his work produce some uncanny effects of doubling – a “Hymn to Diana” for the “Hymn to Pan” in Endymion, a stellar sonnet to match “Bright star!”. Cornwall emerges from this book as Keats’s “worst imaginable competitor”: a writer whose success in assimilating, simplifying and commodifying the aesthetic and political commitments of “Cockney School” poetry gained him an adventitious priority, such that Keats could pass with many contemporary buyers of poetry for a less readable Barry Cornwall. Marggraf Turley considers Cornwall “spectacularly adept at negotiating popular taste”, and asks what his fashionableness might tell us about that “taste” in this period, and about Keats’s unhappy negotiations with the conditions of literary popularity.

As a work of literary criticism, Bright Stars is a study in “interfriction” – the productive rubbing up against one another of individual poems and their authors, but also “popular” and “high” modes of Romanticism and their attendant categories of contemporary celebrity and posthumous fame. Marggraf Turley has some excellent readings that place works by Keats and Cornwall unexpectedly next to each other – or, better still, that respect their original appearance in that configuration, as in his discussion of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and Cornwall’s “Sonnet to Michel Angelo”, first published on consecutive pages of the January 1820 number of Annals of the Fine Arts. Not all the encounters Marggraf Turley stages are so convincing. His reading of Keats’s ode “To Autumn” alongside a seasonal quartet of sonnets by Cornwall strains after “echoes . . . allusions and dialogues”, and has the disadvantage of its distinguished precursor – Nicholas Roe’s suggestion in John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (1997) that “To Autumn” responds covertly to the Peterloo Massacre of August 16, 1819 – in that it must reduce Cornwall’s poems to incoherence in order to make them carry a coded “subversive” message. And while a comparison of Keats’s unstable eroticism with Cornwall’s blander and more confidently “worldly” writing in this mode persuades in outline, some of the detail – the purported discovery of obscene medical in-jokes in The Eve of St Agnes and Isabella, for instance – seems further-fetched even than Porphyro’s dates (“in argosy transferred / From Fez . . .”).

Marggraf Turley demonstrates that Cornwall’s popular success relative to Keats was partly an effect of the accidents and deliberations of publication, as well as of poetic style. For example, Cornwall’s A Sicilian Story and Keats’s Isabella – verse tales based on the same story in Boccaccio’s Decameron – were undertaken in response to a hint in one of Hazlitt’s lectures on the English Poets, which both men had attended in February 1817; but from that shared starting line Cornwall got into print much faster than Keats. A Sicilian Story was published in December 1819 and had gone into a second edition by the time Isabella appeared in the Lamia volume in July 1820, and Marggraf Turley argues that reviewers by then were “too familiar with the tale” in Cornwall’s version to care properly for Keats’s poem.

In fact, Keats did not begin composing Isabella “in early 1819”, as Marggraf Turley states. He had completed the tale much earlier: by April 27, 1818, as he tells his friend and fellow poet J. H. Reynolds in a letter of that date. And his remarks there suggest other reasons for his waiting so long even to think about publishing than his well-documented anxiety about the poem’s critical reception – and reasons that speak to his profound and capacious sense of the sociability of literature. “I have the rest here finish’d”, he tells Reynolds, “and will copy the whole out fair shortly . . . The Compliment is paid by us to Boccace, whether we publish or no: so there is content in this world.” That sense of the poem as a personal “Compliment” to Boccaccio, whose sufficiency would be unaffected by publication, is answered – and complemented – by the independent friendly value Keats places on literary collaboration. At this point he and Reynolds were planning a joint volume of poems from the Decameron. Reynolds was ill in April 1818, however, and could not begin work on his part of the book: “you must not think of it till many months after you are quite well”, Keats urges him: “– then put your passion to it, – and I shall be bound up with you in the shadows of mind, as we are in our matters of human life”. They are already bound up with each other in their correspondence – a composite matter of life and imagination. And the “content” that Keats constantly finds (and seeks to promote) in imagining such private interactions supplies an important counterweight to his extreme unease about addressing his work to the public.

The biographical interest of Bright Stars turns on the question of how well Bryan Waller Procter knew Keats. Here Marggraf Turley runs up against a lack of absolutely conclusive evidence. Some resourceful speculations are made to depend – a little less securely than with the letter to the Edinburgh Magazine – on attributions to Procter of anonymously published journalism. On the basis of verbal echoes in several poems, Marggraf Turley intriguingly and persuasively argues that Procter may have had some degree of access to Keats’s unpublished poetry in manuscript via the extended Hunt circle. One often wants – and sometimes feels that one might have had – more chronological detail on such matters, as well as on particular sequences of composition and publication. The question of plagiarism comes up several times (though only ever in passing); possible anxiety about that is offered as a motive for Procter’s speaking up for the 1820 volume, as is a more generalized sense of guilt “that his often flimsy verse had so entirely displaced Keats’s poetry in the public’s imagination”. There do appear to be traces of regret on this head in the obituary he wrote of Keats. But what Marggraf Turley calls Procter’s “generous spirit” and ability “to . . . take genuine delight” in Keats’s writing, together with the “amiability” that almost everyone who knew him in person or in print noticed about him, perhaps provide an adequate explanation.

Keats noticed that “amiability” too, though he did not quite know what to make of it. Writing to Reynolds on February 28, 1820, and noting that Barry Cornwall had sent him two volumes of his poetry, he remarked of the poems themselves:

"I confess they tease me – they are composed of Amiability the Seasons, the Leaves, the Moon &c. upon which he rings (according to Hunt’s expression) triple bob majors. However that is nothing – I think he likes poetry for its own sake, not his."

That turn away from a momentary vexation to the measured confidence of “I think” is utterly Keatsian, and recalls a justly famous moment in another, earlier letter. Writing to his brother and sister-in-law in America on October 14, 1818, he puts aside discussion both of the negative critical response to Endymion and of the few public defences of the poem: “This is a mere matter of the moment – I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death”. Richard Marggraf Turley writes beautifully about the cross-currents of impatience and appreciation in Keats’s estimate of Cornwall, but he cannot take seriously Keats’s imaginings (“myths . . . fantasies”) of a readership and a companionship for his own writing beyond the moment of its publication. Reynolds was the author of one of the articles in defence of Endymion, and at this moment he was trying to persuade Keats to publish Isabella “as an answer to the attacks made on me in Blackwood’s Magazine and the Quarterly Review”. In holding out against that advice, and holding on to the poem a little longer, Keats might be seen as confirming in his own conduct what he would admire in Cornwall – his liking poetry “for its own sake, not his”. For that to be true of either poet, it would have to be so in spite of popularity or the desire for it, and with a full, contented sense of all the sociable relations – to both the living and the dead – that poetry involves, and all the compliments it is open to its practitioners to pay.



Daisy Hay
YOUNG ROMANTICS
The Shelleys, Byron and other tangled lives 384pp. Bloomsbury. £20.
978 0 7475 8627 2
US: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $27.50.
978 0 374 12375 8

Richard Marggraf Turley
BRIGHT STARS
John Keats, “Barry Cornwall” and Romantic literary culture
256pp. Liverpool University Press. £65.
978 1 84631 211 3

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