by Stuart Kelly
The Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich recorded what a journalist, Alexei Suvorin, maintained the second volume would have involved. The central character was the saintly Alyosha Karamazov, younger brother to the atheist writer Ivan, the dissolute but endearing Dmitry, and the murderous half-brother Smerdyakov. “It seems to you that in my last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, there was much that was prophetic. But wait for the continuation. In it, Alyosha will leave the monastery and become an anarchist. And my pure Alyosha will kill the Tsar!”
Dostoyevsky died on January 28, 1881. At the end of February 1881, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated.
Sir Richard Burton
{1821–1890}
WITNESSING CANNIBALISM WAS one of the few ambitions Sir Richard Burton failed to satisfy. As an explorer, author, intelligence agent, and diplomat, he had chalked up an astonishing number of firsts, and an equally honorable number of bizarre near-misses. He was the first European to perform the hajj, the ritual pilgrimage from Medina to Mecca, disguised as a practicing Muslim. He discovered the Great Lakes in the interior of Africa, though, through illness, he did not succeed in locating the source of the Nile. He studied Mormons in Salt Lake City, and met the religion’s own St. Paul, Brigham Young. He toured the battlefields of Paraguay after the disastrous war waged by Francisco López and his mistress Eliza Lynch.
He was the first Christian to enter the Ethiopian Islamic stronghold of Harar, which was forbidden to outsiders, and, with his redoubtable wife, Isabel, he reached the city of Palmyra without the help of the Bedouins who controlled the routes. During an ambush in Somaliland, a spear was thrust through his cheeks. Burton’s search for gold in the Midian failed, though if he had been looking for oil he would have become a rich man. Similarly, during his consulship in West Africa, he failed to appreciate the pecuniary potential in an “exceptionally sweet” drink combining water and kola nuts, though he did patent a beverage called “Captain Burton’s Tonic Bitters.”
His peregrinations were distilled into a remarkable literary oeuvre, comprising geography, ethnology, anthropology, poetry, swordsmanship, translation, satire, and a complete, unexpurgated, and annotated edition of The Arabian Nights in sixteen volumes. He mastered over twenty languages as well as countless local dialects, wrote definitively on the Portuguese poet Camoëns, and published forty-seven works in his lifetime, followed by several posthumous volumes.
Physically courageous and intellectually daunting, he should have been a Boy’s Own hero, but a sticky film of innuendo and rumor clung to his reputation, and not without cause. Burton never suffered fools gladly, and his indiscreet criticisms of imperial policy in the Indian subcontinent and Africa earned him the disapprobation of his superiors. He was arrogant, ambitious, and fond of bitingly sarcastic reproaches. Perhaps most damaging for his hopes of advancement, his insatiable curiosity extended into the realms of the erotic.
As a young soldier in Karachi, with a proven flair for languages and an unparalleled ability to pass himself off as a native, he was asked by Sir Charles Napier to prepare a confidential report on alleged homosexual brothels. The resulting document was authoritative to a shocking degree, sparing the reader no detail about the relative practices of eunuchs, pederasts, and catamites. Although the report was supposed to be destroyed, it was skimmed by the eyes of Napier’s successor as governor of Sindh, the civilian R. K. Pringle, who was so shocked he forwarded the document to the authorities, recommending that Burton be immediately dismissed.
The actual report has never resurfaced in the annals of bureaucracy, but the beginnings of Burton’s notoriety as a Byronic libertine were established. Furthermore, his successful impersonation of a Muslim pilgrim led to persistent rumors that he had actually converted, and that he harbored a deep animosity, not only to missionaries, but to the Christian religion in general.
Burton, half-jokingly, later claimed that he had broken every one of the Ten Commandments. That any respectable Victorian woman would marry the infamous Burton was unlikely: that an ardent Roman Catholic girl from an aristocratic family would elope to do so is even more surprising. Isabel Arundell had been in love with Burton since she had met him at the age of nineteen, and bolstered by a gypsy prophecy that she would marry a Burton, she turned down countless suitors, flew in the face of her mother’s protestations, and ran off with him.
Isabel, in many ways, was the ideal companion. She combined self-will and submissiveness to an extraordinary degree. Having singlemindedly won her man, she then advised future brides to tolerate everything. In a phrase rich with metaphorical possibilities, she counseled them to let their husbands smoke at home, since they would assuredly find someplace else to, should it be frowned upon. She shocked guests by wearing trousers, and accompanied Burton on some of his most dangerous escapades. Unstintingly loyal, she acted as his literary agent and harangued lukewarm reviewers. It was only after his death that erstwhile lifelong friends launched a cacophony of animosity against her. After her own death, numerous biographers colluded in depicting her as an unfit, inferior partner.
Richard Burton made Isabel his literary executrix in the year of his death. He had already published his translation of the Kama Sutra and the explicit commentary on sexual behavior that accompanied The Tales of 1001 Nights. Both of them were aware of the levels of censorious prudery in late Victorian society: the Edinburgh Review, in its notice of Burton’s 1001 Nights, compared rival translations and declared, “Galland is for the nursery, Lane for the study and Burton for the sewers.”
Burton’s attitude was one of frustrated defiance. If he was prosecuted for obscenity, he intended to arrive at court with the Bible, Shakespeare, and Rabelais and ask how much of those works was to be suppressed. A vein of utter devilry runs through some of his correspondence. When working on a study of the geographical limits in which sodomy was permissible, he hoped that “Mrs. Grundy”—the personification of nineteenth-century puritanism—would “howl on her big bum to her heart’s content.”
Isabel had always been more cautious. She had prepared a bowdlerized version of the 1001 Nights, dedicated “To the Women of England,” and her frequent defenses of Burton’s views became the targets for gleefully malicious reviewers. Nonetheless, before he died, Burton trusted her with his extant manuscripts and prepared an inventory of what was to be burned.
In later years, the myth of Lady Burton’s embittered and ignorant act of arson would be elevated to the status of fact. The poet Swinburne, who had admired Isabel as a wife, would refer to her as a harpy when she was a widow, his vitriol exacerbated by the fact that she had arranged for her unconscious, agnostic husband to be given extreme unction. Isabel Burton did burn some papers, most notably the entire 1,200 pages of his translation of the Arabic erotic classic The Scented Garden. Burton had previously written a version based on French translations, entitled The Perfumed Garden, and had been engaged in an edition from the original language at the time of his death.
Isabel did, however, prepare various posthumous works for publication. When news of the destruction of The Scented Garden broke, rumors started that Isabel had actually secreted the manuscript in her husband’s crypt. Unscrupulous publishers kept hinting that they had access to another copy, which would shortly appear, alongside other works “by” Burton. In light of the difficulties of managing the estate and fending off unauthorized or counterfeit editions, her own will stipulated that everything should be burned: her papers, her manuscripts, his unpublished works, his remnants. It was not wholly successful: a work that Burton had wanted destroyed—an essay on a mysterious Arabian sect of Jews who supposedly performed human sacrifices—appeared after Isabel’s death.
It was following Isabel’s, not Richard’s, death that the real literary cremation took place. Burton’s journals from 1872 to 1890, alongside her own teenage diaries; their letters; his unfinished manuscripts on the lowlands of Brazil and North, Central, and South America; Syrian proverbs; notes on the eunuch trade; translations of Ovid, Ausoniu
s, and Ariosto; studies of polygamy: all were erased. Isabel had already destroyed her own book The Sixth Sense. It was not out of spite, but out of love, that she had ever burned anything at all. Had their correspondence alone been spared, the speculation about the relationship between these two remarkable and devoted people would have been instantly stilled.
But her detractors had done their job well, and Isabel would be blamed for the pyre in subsequent biographies. Few would mention that Burton had already lost a lot of unpublished material during a warehouse fire in 1860. Among those papers was one study that might have proved more interesting than yet more erotological investigations. As a soldier in Karachi, Burton had kept forty monkeys in a house, and was attempting to use his formidable literary abilities to understand their language. The results of this experiment—a vocabulary of sixty words—were lost thirty-six years before the more conspicuous conflagration.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
{1837–1909}
“I AM TOLD that Mr. Swinburne is the best poet in my dominions,” said Queen Victoria. Such high estimation of his voluminous work did not even last as long as her reign.
The unfortunate poet, with his preternaturally large head and shock of red hair, became a byword for the aesthetic excesses and sexual peccadilloes of the so-called Decadent period. His enthusiastic interest in spanking and his ostentatious display of classical mythology seemed dated and, frankly, immature, even before the Great War. He yearned to be un poète maudit, an iconoclastic libertine in the manner of Baudelaire or Villon, and yet the closest he came to being tortured was convoluted grammar and the occasional birching.
It is, indeed, difficult to take lines like these, from “Dolores,” seriously:
O lips full of lust and of laughter,
Curled snakes that are fed from my breast,
Bite hard, lest remembrance come after
And press with new lips where you pressed.
For my heart too springs up at the pressure,
Mine eyelids too moisten and burn;
Ah, feed me and fill me with pleasure,
Ere pain come in turn.
Swinburne himself admitted being wary of his “tendency to the dulcet and luscious form of verbosity,” and could even compose passable self-parodies of his alliterative and meandering verse, such as:
Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day, when we die.
It is regrettable that his wit was rarely in evidence in his poetry. As an undergraduate, he regaled his acolytes with satirical squibs, where contemporary events were retold as if they were historical dramas in the style of Victor Hugo. A friend, W. H. Mallock, recollected one in which Queen Victoria was embroiled in a love-tryst between the politicians Lord John Russell and Sir Robert Peel. Perhaps it was during this comedy that Swinburne also composed Victoria’s anguished confession that she had been seduced by an elderly William Wordsworth.
Later, in this vaudeville of Victorian high politics, the focus moves to the illegitimate daughter of the monarch and Lord Russell, who becomes a courtesan under the pseudonym “Miss Kitty” and enthralls various princes and statesmen. “She may have done everything which might have made a Messalina blush, but whenever she looked at the sky, she murmured ‘God,’ and whenever she looked at a flower she murmured ‘mother,’” lauds one of her suitors.
After which, Mallock remarks, Swinburne tossed off another glass of port and collapsed into an inebriated slumber.
Puerile, yes, and to an extent just silliness. But if Swinburne had forgone the all-too-frequent jiggers and snifters, and dashed down these skits in manuscripts for his friends, we might now remember him as a precursor to alternative comedy and the satirical irreverence of the 1960s, rather than as a fey and eminently forgettable minor poet of the 1860s.
Émile Zola
{1840–1902}
ON FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 1893, Émile Zola, the most controversial French novelist of his day, addressed the English Institute of Journalists at Lincoln’s Inn Hall in London. It was an influential gathering, and a rare accolade for the author, fresh from the completion of his monumental twenty-volume cycle of novels, L’Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire, better known as Les Rougon-Macquart.
The subject on which he was asked to speak was curiously apposite: anonymity. Although Zola was indisputably infamous (reviewers had called him everything from a “hysterical pornographer” to a “literary sewer-man”) he was also uncompromisingly private, even unknowable. From this self-imposed distance, Zola seemed more—or less—than a man. He was a factory through which the raw materials of the world were transformed into novels.
Unrelentingly prodigious, Zola catalogued the upper echelons and abysmal depths of French society, rigorously abiding by his motto Nulla dies sine linea: no day without a line. George Moore, the philosopher whose professorial writings would have such an impact on the Bloomsbury group, described the Institute of Journalists congress in the Illustrated Magazine and captured something of this overwhelming productivity when he lamented that, although the Rougon-Macquart sequence was concluded, readers were “now threatened with a novel on Lourdes, which is to be written in seven months; by a novel on Rome, and by another on the Russian Alliance.” The first two titles duly appeared, followed by Paris (1897) to complete the Trois Villes trilogy. In a rare deviation from his intentions, the Russian Alliance fiction evaporated.
Zola had not always been so unswervingly modern. As an earnest young Romantic, he considered himself a poet. “In this materialist age,” he hymned, “when commerce absorbs everyone, when the sciences, which have grown so big and robust, render man vainglorious and make him forget the supreme intelligence, a holy mission awaits the poet: at every moment and everywhere to show the soul to those who think only about the body, and God to those in whom science has killed faith.”
God, however, proved no match for the literary critic Hippolyte Taine and the scientist Prosper Lucas. By reading Taine’s Histoire de la littératureanglaise, with its creed of “race, milieu and moment,” and discovering genetic determinism in Lucas’s Traité de l’hérédité naturelle, Zola threw off his dreamy chasuble and reinvented himself as the scientist of literature. Studied through the lens of inherited characteristics and environmental adaptations, the seeming flurry of humanity crystallized into perfect regularity. The unpredictable was factored out. Tragedies were inevitable but their causes comprehensible. Mankind, thought Zola, would slowly learn to adjust its negative propensities: he did not envisage that later generations would derive, from the same half-understood science, eugenics.
Thérèse Raquin (1867) explored how this mechanized aesthetic might be programmed into a novel. The critics loathed it, and against their aghast denunciations, Zola depicted himself as an impersonal clinician who had “simply applied to . . . living bodies the analytical method that surgeons apply to corpses.” A one-off succès d’horreur was, however, hardly sufficient for his ambitions. From the outset, he was drawn to grandiose schemes. A trilogy on heroism had already been abandoned, as it was considered too light a theme. Looking at a blank wall, a few years earlier, he had come up with La Chaîne des êtres, a poem in three cantos, entitled “Past,” “Present,” and “Future,” that would trace humanity from the Stone Age to its “magnificent divagation,” while providing a comprehensive survey of “what physiology tells us about the physical man and philosophy about the moral man.” He only had time to jot down eight lines.
The obsession with multivolume structures may be linked with a certain eccentricity of Zola’s: a psychological condition called arithmomania. He had to count continually. Daundering down the boulevard, he checked off lampposts, trees, doorways. Taxi registration numbers had to be subjected to some abstruse personal calculus, to divulge if they were lucky or unlucky. When it became transparent that the Histoire d’une famille would overrun the ten novels he had allotted, it was revised, not to eleven or twelve, but twenty. The f
amily tree developed a few quirks and offshoots along the way—a brother materialized out of thin air in La Bête humaine, his brothers blissfully unaware of their sibling during L’Assommoir, Germinal, and L’Oeuvre, and the childless pander Sidonie Rougon, from La Curée, nonetheless transpired to have a mystery child, Angélique, the heroine of Le Rêve (though even reading the whole of the Rougon-Macquart would not enlighten the poor girl about her parentage). Nonetheless, a quarter-century before its completion, Zola already had the architecture of the series fixed.
From La Fortune des Rougon (1871) to Le Docteur Pascal (1893), Zola created “a simple exposé of the facts of a family, showing the inner mechanism that makes it run”; a panoramic vision of department stores and gin-traps, railway engines and secret gardens, peasants and politicians, tortured artists and high-class doxies; in short, “the tableau of a dead reign, a strange era fraught with madness and shame.” It brought him vilification and celebration. It had turned him into a perpetual prosification device, an inexhaustible ream-machine. And although tidbits and titles of his future projects were leaked in London, no one could have predicted the drama that would occupy his final decade: the Dreyfus affair.
In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery captain, was arrested and found guilty at a court-martial of treason. According to the prosecutor, he had sold secrets about military placements and the specifics of weaponry to the Germans. He was transported the following year to Devil’s Island. He was later discovered to be innocent. Dreyfus was Jewish—a fact almost incidental to himself but of material significance to his accusers. In 1896, the intelligence chief, Colonel Picquart, suspected that the evidence for the conviction was unsound and on investigation discovered that one Major Esterhazy was actually the spy. He made his concerns known to his superiors and was swiftly reassigned to North Africa.
