by Stuart Kelly
Yet Scott thought it equal to Ivanhoe. He burned the opening and rewrote it, and intended to accompany it with a poem about St. George and a dragon of Rhodes, the former residence of the Knights of St. John, having seen his friend William Gell’s sketch of a dinosaur skeleton embedded in the roof of a church. A travel book about Malta was promised, but never delivered. Hints that his mental health was none too sound can be seen in his behavior before leaving England. His fears about the Reform Bill and the rumor that the Whig government might make the FitzClarences the legitimate heirs to the throne spurred him into conceiving a plan for the kidnapping of Princess Victoria, securing her protection in Scotland, and installing Wellington as dictator.
Scott had hoped to visit Goethe on their homeward journey; however, when he heard that Goethe had died, it strengthened his own desire to return, so that he too should die at home. On July 11 he reached Abbots-ford, and died two months later, safe in the knowledge that the forthcoming Siege of Malta was in the capable hands of his son-in-law and publisher.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
{1772–1834}
NO OTHER AUTHOR in the history of literature has been so detrimentally affected by that most poetic of embarrassing afflictions, scriptus interruptus. It is not the purpose of this book to offer a clinical diagnosis, outlining the high-risk lifestyle choices and genetic misfortunes that might lead to what is vulgarly termed “premature ending”; however, the case history of Samuel Taylor Coleridge may well prove invaluable to those who might wish to undertake such an investigation.
Coleridge’s theory of poetic composition made him peculiarly vulnerable to untimely and terminal cessation, often even before the work in question had developed any form or coherent narrative that might allow it to be continued at a later date. Since a feeling of “inspiration” was necessary, and that sensation was tacitly supposed to be untethered from the writer’s conscious control, its sudden departure was equally unpremeditated, and must prove intransigent to any coaxings or pleadings from his rational mind. Furthermore, and this is typical, he somehow managed to simultaneously realize the ramifications of his condition and yet still believe that the exertion of his will, or a happier set of circumstances, might prevent any recurrence of the syndrome.
For our purposes, the most pertinent documentation of this ailment was written in 1816, some nineteen years after the incident in question took place. This delay in his revelation, in itself, is eloquent testimony to the deep-seated repressions and fear of social stigmatization that must have accompanied the original, dare we say, traumatic occasion. Perhaps it would be best, at this juncture, to hear from the man himself:
KUBLA KHAN:
OR, A VISION IN A DREAM. A FRAGMENT The following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great fame and deserved celebrity,
(Excuse me, he means Lord Byron.)
and, as far as the Author’s own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merit.
(Again, might we just point out that the italicization of poetic might reveal a lurking anxiety? Is poetry somehow the opposite of psychology, something from beyond the brain? Or is Coleridge foisting on the term, even transferring onto it, his own deep-seated desire not to be held responsible or accountable for the result?)
In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill-health
(Note: referring to himself as “the Author” instead of “I”: very dissociative.)
had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair
(Having, in fact, actively administered, ahem, some grains of opium.)
at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in “Purchas’s Pilgrimage”: “Here Kubla Khan commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed within a wall.”
(It seems superfluous to mention that these lines do not appear in Purchas’sPilgrimage.)
The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he had the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the lines rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort.
(What were the things? Pictures? Deliria? We should not be so naïve as to think that a cinema projected behind his eyes: surely the vision was of lines of text! And as for effort, he had already succumbed to believing effort is not worth a fig.)
On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him for above an hour,
(Any attempt to fix the identity of the person is fruitless. Any number of cold-calling friends, debt collectors, and anti-Muses has been supposed; but they ignore the obvious dichotomy: a business person whose habitation is as specific as his identity is anonymous.)
and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!
Mortification: obviously, humiliation, but with the queasy sense of orgasmic release, imparted by the litotes of “no small surprise.” Did anyone arrive at all, or is this an unsubtle admission that he interrupted himself before the inspiration reached fruition? As to the meaning of the vision, the words of William Hazlitt seem apposite. He thought Coleridge wrote “better nonsense verses than any man in England.” Yet the poem itself, despite its languorous and exotic tone, contains hints that the vision had fled before he ever put quill to ink. “Could I revive within me / Her symphony and song,” he pleads; and the less said about the “fast thick pants” leading to “a mighty fountain momently . . . forced,” the better.
Scriptus interruptus reached pandemic proportions among the Romantic writers of the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Shelley’s identification with the “uncontrollable” West Wind and “unpremeditated” Skylark captures some of the typical symptoms. Keats twice attempted to write an epic on the Titans struggling against the Olympian gods in Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, and failed twice. They were published with the excuse that the reception given to his previous work, Endymion, “discouraged the author from proceeding.” It had, admittedly, been described by John Gibson Lockhart as “calm, settled, imperturbable drivelling idiocy.”
Coleridge, in moments of clarity, wrote affectingly on his etiolated condition. “By what I have effected, am I to be judged by my fellowmen; what I could have done is a question for my own conscience,” he wrote in his Biographia Literaria, shortly after detailing an epic poem on the progress of a brook from source to sea in the Quantocks. In a letter to his friend Allsop, after years of publishing little and writing less poetry, he nonetheless still harbored dreams of a restored condition:
Of my poetic works, I would fain finish the “Christabel.” Alas! for the proud time when I planned, when I had present in my mind, the materials, as well as the scheme, of the Hymns entitled Spirit, Sun, Earth, Air, Water, Fire, and Man: and the Epic Poem on—what still seems to me the one only fit subject remaining for an Epic Poem—Jerusalem besieged and destroyed by Titus.
Too often, sufferers from this fearful incapacity are derided as delusional, lazy, vapid, unproductive, prima donna–ish, lackadaisical dreamers. They are not.
They are ill. A telephone hotline or a support group should be set up.
Jane Austen
{1775–1817}
THE DIVINE JANE! Only forty-two, only six novels to her name, only four of them published, when a systematic erosion of her suprarenal cortex ushered her into the spinster-cold earth! A slight corpus from a diminishing body. Margaret Drabble was surely right, were we only discussing works in English, when she remarked that “there would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new major play by Shakespeare.” “Those six perfect novels,” as the critic Sue Gaisford has called them, are a quiet rebuke to the voluminous acres produced to order by those Victorian sensationalists.
Sir Walter Scott, whose fame, for a moment, seemed to eclipse Austen’s, realized that her work was destined for immortality. “That young lady,” he wrote in his journal, nine years after her death, “had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me.”
With such a slender oeuvre, it is understandable that every manuscript fragment, teenage letter, and drafted project found its way into print. Austen’s nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, first published some of the incomplete works in the second edition of his 1871 Memoir, against the judgment of his half-sister. The Oxford editor R. W. Chapman added a seventh volume, Minor Works, to the six novels of the 1925 Collected Works. The three scrapbooks of her teenage bagatelles have also been published; nearly every word of Austen’s that has survived can now be bought in paperback. In these remnants and patches we glimpse a radically different author from the whalebone-corseted, elegantly quadrill’ing stereotype so beloved by television adaptors.
Austen’s juvenilia was highly thought of by her family. Her father gave her the second volume, bound in white vellum, and inscribed in the third, “Effusions of Fancy by a very Young Lady Consisting of Tales in a Style entirely new.” Readers expecting the mature, sardonic politeness may be lulled into a false sense of security. In Jack and Alice, for example, nothing could seem more indicative of Austen’s future writing career than a statement such as “Every wish of Caroline was centred in a titled Husband . . .” Yet a few pages later, when another young girl relates her quest to catch a glimpse of her beau, things start to become peculiar.
On enquiring for his House I was directed thro’ this Wood . . . With a heart elated by the expected happiness of beholding him I entered and had proceeded thus far in my progress thro’ it, when I found myself suddenly seized by the leg and on examining the cause of it, found that I was caught in one of the steel traps so common in gentlemen’s grounds.
Throughout these youthful jeux d’esprit, there is a streak of cackling sadism. Austen revels in violent altercations, drunkenness, and bizarre switchbacks between professed goodness and despicable behavior. In “The Beautifull Cassandra,” the heroine “then proceeded to a Pastry-cooks where she devoured six ices, refused to pay for them, knocked down the Pastry-cook and walked away.” In Henry and Eliza the adopted child grew up “Beloved by Lady Harcourt, adored by Sir George and admired by all the World” and lived “in a continued course of uninterrupted Happiness, till she had attained her eighteenth year, when happening one day to be detected in stealing a banknote of 50£, she was turned out of doors by her inhuman Benefactors.”
Instead of wit, we have black comedy; instead of manners, mayhem. Austen’s History of England of 1791 “by a partial, prejudiced and ignorant Historian” is a little comic masterpiece, which displays an assured feel for irony, a talent for understatement, and a very writerly capacity to simultaneously postulate and subvert. Of the earl of Essex she says,
he was beheaded, of which he might with reason have been proud, had he known that such was the death of Mary Queen of Scotland; but as it was impossible that He should be conscious of what had never happened, it does not appear that he felt particularly delighted with the manner of it.
More than in her romantic fables, The History of England shows a writer whose voice is beginning to flex.
Within four years her ambition was outgrowing such extravaganzas; her skill was smoothing as well as tightening. Elinor and Marianne, an epistolary novel, would be revised into Sense and Sensibility. First Impressions would metamorphose into Pride and Prejudice. Though scholars may lament the loss of these manuscripts, and the chance to dissect the development of her genius, the finished novels more than compensate for the loss.
Austen was realizing the limitations of the traditional, epistolary form. Lady Susan is such a novel, and although it has its moments, and Lady Susan herself is a more formidable, malign presence than later characters, the strictures clearly grate with the author. She ends it with a flourish of impatience: “This correspondence, by a meeting between some of the parties and a separation between others, could not, to the great detriment of the Post Office revenue, be continued longer.”
Austen barely wrote anything between 1801 and 1811. Perhaps because of her disappointments at the hands of publishers who had accepted her work but refused to print it; perhaps because of the move from her idyllic Steventon to frosty, fashionable Bath; perhaps for countless reasons: she does not tell us. She did begin another novel, entitled The Watsons, which was set aside in 1805. Her nephew claimed that “the author became aware of the evil of having placed her heroine too low, in such a position of poverty and obscurity . . . like a singer who has begun on too low a note, she discontinued the strain.” A more psychologically plausible reading might be that she intended her heroine, Fanny Watson, to face her father’s death. Her own father, Rev. George Austen, died in 1805; there are no depicted paternal deaths in any of Austen’s complete or unfinished novels.
Toward the end of her life, after moving to Chawton and enjoying her first successes as a published author, Austen started a novel called Sanditon. She only lived to write twelve chapters: what we now know as Addison’s disease was rendering her weak, bilious, and, as she said in a letter, her skin had gone “black & white & every wrong colour.” Sanditon is the most melancholy example of a work terminated by illness. Its tantalizing enigma lies not in its resemblance to her other works, but in its differences.
Austen had previously described her matter and métier in a letter to her niece, Anna. She had written, “Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on”; and yet Sanditon takes place in a newly emerging spa town, with families flocking to take the health-giving sea air throughout the chapters that are extant.
Whereas it is easy to see how the romantic conundrums of The Watsons might have panned out, the fragment of Sanditon had only got to the stage where the reader knows of four young women, all in want of a husband, and three distinctly ineligible men. One of them desperately wants to be a dashing cad. Whereas in previous works Austen had introduced young men whose nefarious agendas only became clear when their devious schemes came to fruition, Sanditon has an aspiring villain from the outset. Young Sir Edward Denham, whose title does not imply any cash in his pockets, is described thus: “Sir Edward’s great object in life was to be seductive.”
There are more than just moments when the Austenesque shines through. Some of these moments exemplify her mordant, precise style. Take, for example, this extract: “the Miss Beauforts were soon satisfied with ‘the circle in which they moved in Sanditon’ to use a proper phrase, for everybody must now ‘move in a circle’,—to the prevalence of which rotary motion, is perhaps to be attributed the giddiness and false steps of many.” Perfect: not as a novel, but just, wholly, as a sentence.
Perhaps the oddest aspect of Sanditon is its satire. Austen knew she was ill, suspected she was dying, and started a novel in which hypochondriacs are skewered. Sanditon’s foun
der has three siblings with variously comical and possibly self-induced nervous disorders: Arthur is a pudding-shaped stay-at-home who couldn’t dream of being well enough to get a job; his sisters, Diana and Susan, rarely eat, get their teeth extracted for safety’s sake, and are clouds of static electricity desperate to earth themselves.
Although Austen described her writing as “the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a brush,” we must remember that this is the interim judgment of a novelist who did not live to fully explore her genius. Sanditon amply demonstrates that she could tackle a wider canvas.
In 1816, Austen sketched out a “Plan of a Novel, according to hints from various quarters.” She never intended to write it; the “Plan” itself was sufficient to show up the folly of her critics. The heroine would be the daughter of a clergyman, who would be “driven from his Curacy by the vile arts of some totally unprincipled and heartless young Man, desperately in love with the Heroine.” Father and daughter would “never [be] above a fortnight together in one place,” and would be pursued across Europe by the infamous and ardent lover. The heroine would have to work “worn down to a Skeleton” to support them, eventually eking out an existence in Kamchatka, on the eastern borders of Russia. The father, “quite worn down, finding his end approaching, throws himself on the Ground, and after 4 or 5 hours of tender advice . . . expires in a burst of Literary Enthusiasm” (supposedly the suggestion of a family friend, Henry Sandford).
Austen also includes some of the plots sent to her by James Stanier Clarke, the prince regent’s librarian. Austen had corresponded with Clarke about permission to dedicate Emma to the prince regent—a request he was pleased to grant. By the by, Clarke modestly offered some possible stories:
