A Little History of Literature

by John Sutherland

  my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines’, which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.

  What had happened was that, stimulated by that taste, the whole of his life was flooding back into his mind. All that mattered now was to get it on paper.

  Proust's novel is a life's work. Nothing of great moment happens in the life it records (as the above passage implies) but Proust's art creates out of ‘himself’ one of the great monuments of world literature. Proust and Wilde knew each other and in his exile the French author went out of his way to be kind to his disgraced fellow author. Remembrance of Things Past is the kind of novel Wilde might himself have written (and comes close to sketching in De Profundis) had he been spared prison and given years in which to continue as ‘Oscar’ rather than Prisoner C.3.3. The Decadent movement came and went, and left behind it flowers as well as decay.

  CHAPTER 22

  Poets Laureate

  TENNYSON

  The poet. What images does the little word call up? Like me, perhaps, your mind's eye pictures a man with blazing eyes, a far-away look, flowing hair, clad in loose garb. Or a woman, standing on a rock, or some other eminence, gazing into the far distance. Cloud, sea, wind and storm are in the air. Both figures are solitary. ‘Lonely’ as Wordsworth put it, ‘as a cloud’.

  There may be an aura of madness – the Romans called it ‘furor poeticus’. Many of our greatest poets (John Clare and Ezra Pound, to take two of the very greatest) actually spent portions of their lives in mental institutions. Many contemporary writers spend more time on the psychoanalyst's couch than in the literary agent's office.

  The critic Edmund Wilson borrowed an image from antiquity to describe the poet. He was, said Wilson, like Philoctetes in the Iliad. Philoctetes was the greatest archer in the world. His bow could win wars. Things were going badly for the Greeks at the siege of Troy. They needed Philoctetes. But they had banished him to an island. Why? Because he had a wound that stank so much no one could bear to be around him. Ulysses was sent to bring him to besieged Troy. But if the Greeks wanted the bow, they also had to put up with the stench. That, thinks Wilson, is the image of the poet – necessary, but impossible to live with.

  We tend to think of a poet as not just lonely but – essentially – an outsider. A voice in the wilderness. The poet, said the philosopher John Stuart Mill (whose life had been transformed by his reading of Wordsworth's poetry) is not ‘heard’, but ‘overheard’. The poet's most important relationship is not with us, the reader, but with their ‘muse’. The muse is a mean employer. She showers the poet with inspiration (the word suggests ‘sacred breath’), but no cash. None can expect poverty as confidently as the maker of verses – hence the expression, ‘poet's garret’ (a garret is a dingy attic). Who talks about ‘the doctor's garret’, or ‘the lawyer's garret’?

  The poet Philip Larkin once said that the poet sings most sweetly when, like the legendary thrush, the thorn is pressed most sharply against its bosom. But it's not a question of giving poets more money, or removing the many thorns from their bosom. Another image, this time George Orwell's, makes the point graphically. Orwell liked to picture society as a whale. It was the nature of this monster to want to swallow up human beings – as, in the Bible, the whale swallows the living Jonah. Jonah is not chewed up and eaten by the leviathan, he is imprisoned ‘in the belly of the beast’. It was the duty of the artist to remain ‘outside the whale’ as Orwell put it: close enough to see it (or ‘harpoon’ it with satires like his own Animal Farm), but not, like Jonah, to be swallowed up by it. The poet is the artist for whom it is most necessary to keep their distance from things.

  Poetry long pre-dates any written or printed literature. Every society we know of – historically and geographically – has its poets. Whatever one calls them – bard, skald, minstrel, singer, rhymer – the poet has always had the same difficult ‘outsider-insider’ relationship with society.

  In feudal society, nobles liked to have their personal minstrels (along with their court jesters) to entertain them and their guests. Sir Walter Scott wrote his finest poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) about it. Since the seventeenth century England has had its poet laureate, the monarch's appointed verse-maker and a member of the royal household. More recently the USA has begun appointing its poet laureates, too. Before 1986 they were called, awkwardly, ‘Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress’. The term ‘laureate’ refers back to ancient Greece and Rome, and means ‘crowned with laurel leaves’. The laureate won his (always his) leafy crown by verbal gladiatorial combat with other poets. (Rappers, the bards of our day, still do this in freestyle battles.) The first official poet laureate in England was John Dryden, who held the post under Charles II from 1668 to 1689, although he seems not to have been overly conscientious about his responsibilities. Thereafter the poet laureate was, for centuries, something of a joke. One who held the post, for example, was Henry Pye (laureate 1790–1813). The study of literature has been my profession for more years than I care to remember, but I could not come up with a single line from memory of Henry James Pye's verse. I'm not ashamed.

  All too often, mockery was what the poet laureate could expect, along with the dubious honour of the title and the paltry payment that came with it (traditionally a few gold coins and a ‘pipe’, or barrel, of port). When Robert Southey (laureate 1813–43) wrote a poem on the recently deceased King George III being welcomed into Heaven by a toadyish St Peter, called A Vision of Judgement (1821), Byron tore into him with The Vision of Judgment (spot the – very slight – difference?), regarded as one of the greatest satires in the language. When he wrote it, Byron was an exile in Italy, having been hounded out of England for supposed immorality. Which poet is remembered today? The insider, or the outsider? Sir Walter Scott (see Chapter 15) declined the honour of the laureateship (in favour of Southey) because, as he put it, the post would adhere to his fingers like sticky tape, preventing him from writing freely. Scott wanted his poetic freedom.

  The poet who succeeded in the post and the role of the ‘institutional poet’ – the poet wholly inside Orwell's whale – but who despite that wrote great poetry, was Alfred Tennyson (1809–92).

  Unusual for his times, Tennyson lived to over eighty, two decades longer than Dickens, five decades longer than Keats. What might they have done with those Tennysonian years?

  Tennyson published his first volume of poems when he was just twenty-two. It contained what are still many of his best-known lyrics, such as ‘Mariana’. Alfred regarded himself at this period as very much a Romantic poet – the heir to Keats. But Romanticism, as a vital literary movement, had faded by the 1830s. No one wanted warmed-over Keats. There ensued a long fallow period in his career – the ‘lost decade’, critics call it. It was a period in the wilderness. He broke out of this paralysis and in 1850, aged forty-one, produced the most famous poem of the Victorian period – In Memoriam A.H.H. It was inspired by the death of his best friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, with whom, it is speculated, his relationship was so intense it might have been sexual. It probably wasn't, but intense, in the kind of ‘manly’ way approved by Victorians, it certainly was.

  The poem is made up of short lyrics, chronicling seventeen years of bereavement. The Victorians mourned the death of a loved one for a full year – in dark clothes, and with black edged notepaper; women wore veils and specially sombre personal jewellery. In this mournful poem Tennyson meditated on the problems that most tormented hi
s age. Religious doubt afflicted the second half of the nineteenth century like a moral disease. Tennyson was afflicted even more than most. If there was a heaven, why did we not rejoice when someone dear to us died and went there? They were going to a better place. But In Memoriam remains essentially a poem about personal grief. And finally, the poem concludes, despite all the pain, ‘'Tis better to have loved and lost /Than never to have loved at all’. Who, having lost a loved one, would wish they had never existed?

  Queen Victoria lost her beloved consort, Albert, to typhoid, in 1861. She wore ‘widow's weeds’ until the end of her life forty years later. She confided that she found great consolation in Mr Tennyson's elegy for his dead friend, and on the strength of it the two, poet and queen, became mutual admirers. Tennyson was not just a Victorian poet – he was Victoria's poet. Appointed her poet laureate in 1850, he would hold the post until his death, forty-two years later.

  The great enterprise of his later years was a massive poem on the nature of ideal English monarchy, Idylls of the King, a chronicle in verse of the reign of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. It was, clearly, an indirect tribute to the English monarchy. Tennyson wrote, as all poet laureates do (even the dynamic Ted Hughes when he held the post from 1984), some very dull stuff. But he also wrote, as poet laureate, some of the finest public poems in English literature, most notably ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ (1854), commemorating a bloody and absolutely hopeless assault by some 600 British cavalry on Russian artillery guns, during the Crimean War. The casualties were huge. A French general watching said, ‘It is magnificent, but it is not war’. Tennyson, who read the account of the engagement in The Times, came up with a poem, written at great speed, which catches the thundering hooves, the blood, and the ‘magnificent madness’ of it all:

  Cannon to right of them,

  Cannon to left of them,

  Cannon behind them

  Volley'd and thunder'd;

  Storm'd at with shot and shell,

  While horse and hero fell,

  They that had fought so well

  Came thro' the jaws of Death

  Back from the mouth of Hell,

  All that was left of them,

  Left of six hundred.

  In his later years, Tennyson played the part of poet majestically, with flowing hair, a luxurious beard and moustache, and a Spanish cape and hat. But beneath the costume and the pose, Tennyson was the most businesslike of authors, as keen as the next man for money and status. He rose to the top of the slipperiest of literary poles to die Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and richer, from his verse, than any poet in the annals of English literature.

  Did he sell out, or was it a finely judged balancing act? Many who care about poetry see a Victorian contemporary, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89), as a ‘truer’ kind of poet. Hopkins was a Jesuit priest who wrote poetry in what little spare time he had. It has been said that his only connection with Victorian England was that he drew breath in it. Hopkins admired Tennyson, but he felt his poetry was what he called ‘Parnassian’ (Parnassus being the poets' mountain in ancient Greece). Bluntly, he felt that Tennyson had surrendered too much by ‘going public’. Hopkins himself would rather have died than publish a poem like In Memoriam for any man or woman in the street to pore over his grief.

  Hopkins burned many of his highly experimental poems. His so-called ‘terrible sonnets’, in which he struggled with religious doubt, are intensely private. He probably never intended anyone other than his closest friend, Robert Bridges, to see them. Bridges (destined, ironically, to become poet laureate himself in 1913) decided, almost thirty years later, to publish the poems Hopkins had entrusted to him. They are regarded as pioneer works of what would, a few years after his death, be called modernism, and change the course of English poetry.

  So who, then, was the truer poet, ‘public’ Tennyson or ‘private’ Hopkins? Poetry has always been able to find room for both kinds.

  CHAPTER 23

  New Lands

  AMERICA AND THE AMERICAN VOICE

  One of the insults that used to be directed at American literature by outsiders was that it didn't exist – there was only English literature written in America. It's ignorant as well as insulting and, not to waste words, plain wrong. George Bernard Shaw commented that ‘England and America are two nations divided by a common language’. It is true of the literature of all different English-speaking nations, but especially true in this case. There is, whatever the fuzzy edges, an American literature as rich and great as any literature anywhere, or that there has ever been in any period in recorded history. It helps to characterise the nature of that literature by looking at its long history and considering some of its masterpieces.

  The starting point of American literature is Anne Bradstreet (1612–72). Every anthology bears witness to the fact. All American literature, said the modern poet John Berryman, pays ‘homage to Mistress Bradstreet’. It marks a difference between British and American literature that in the New World the founding figure is a woman. No one ever said English literature started with Aphra Behn.

  Mistress Bradstreet was born and educated in England. Her family was part of the Puritan ‘Great Migration’ – under religious persecution – to the place they called ‘New England’, the Eastern seaboard of America. Anne was sixteen when she married, and undertook the voyage two years later, never to return. Both her father and her husband would go on to be governors of Massachusetts. While the men of the family were off governing, Anne was charged with running the family farm. She evidently did it well. But she was much more than a competent farmer's wife and the mother of their many children.

  The enlightened Puritans believed that daughters should be as well educated as sons. Anne was intelligent, extraordinarily well read (her contemporary Metaphysicals were of particular interest – see Chapter 9), and was herself an ambitious writer, something which was not frowned upon by her Puritan community, as it might perhaps have been in England. She wrote vast amounts of poetry, but as a spiritual exercise, an act of devotion, rather than for any fame, current or posthumous. Her best poems are short; her life was too busy for long works. Her brother, recognising her genius and the originality of her mind, made heroic efforts to get her verse published in England. There was, as yet, no ‘book world’ in the American colonies.

  Despite their self-imposed exile, the Puritans felt an unbreakable bond with the Old Country – hence placenames like ‘New’ England or ‘New’ York, but there was also a strong sense of permanent spiritual separation. Anne Bradstreet's poems are quintessentially of the New World, as the Puritans saw America and their place in it. Take, for example, her poignant ‘Verses upon the Burning of Our House July 10th, 1666’:

  I blest His name that gave and took,

  That laid my goods now in the dust.

  Yea, so it was, and so 'twas just.

  It was His own, it was not mine …

  The poem concludes, poignantly,

  The world no longer let me love,

  My hope and treasure lies above.

  It's a traditional Puritan sentiment – this world is of no real consequence: what matters is the world to come. But what we hear in the verse is an entirely new voice – an American voice, moreover the voice of an American ‘making’ the new country. Anne and her husband had built that house that now lay in ashes. They would, of course rebuild. America is a country constantly rebuilding itself.

  Puritanism is a foundation stone of American literature. It flowered as literature in the work of the so-called Transcendentalists of New England in the nineteenth century – writers such as Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Transcendentalism is a big word for what was essentially the faith of the early colonials – that the truths of life are ‘above’ things as they appear in the everyday world. Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), chronicling Captain Ahab's hunt for the great white whale, is routinely cited as an archetypally American novel. What makes it that? Th
e sense of endless quest, the pacification (even if it means the destruction) of nature, and the voracious appetite for natural resources to fuel this ever growing, ever self-renewing new nation. Why were whales hunted? Not for sport. Not for food. They were hunted to the point of extinction for the oil extracted from their blubber for lighting, machinery and any number of manufacturing activities.

  Walt Whitman (Chapter 21), the self-declared disciple of Emerson, embodies another aspect of the Transcendentalist tradition – its sense that ‘freedom’, in all its many facets, is the essence of all American ideology, including poetic ideology. In Whitman's case it took the form of ‘free verse’ – poetry unshackled from rhyme, just as the country itself had thrown off the shackles of colonialism in its War of Independence against the British in 1775–83.

  Freedom, in America, presupposes literacy. It has always been a more literate country than Britain. The country's forging of its identity began with a document, the Declaration of Independence. In the nineteenth century America could boast the most literate reading public in the world. But the literature that originated in the United States was somewhat stunted by the country's refusal (in the name of ‘free trade’) to sign up to international copyright regulation until 1891. Before that date, works published in Britain could be published in America, without any payment to the author. Writers like Sir Walter Scott and Dickens were ‘pirated’ in huge quantity and at budget prices. It fostered American literacy but it handicapped the local product. Why pay for some promising young writer when you could get Pickwick Papers free? (American plundering of his work drove Dickens to apoplectic rage – he got his own back in the American chapters of his novel Martin Chuzzlewit.)