A Little History of Literature (21 page)

The years following
The Picture of Dorian Gray
represented the zenith of Wilde's career, when he was writing plays for the London stage. Drama was the perfect vehicle for Wildean wit. His last play,
The Importance of Being Earnest
, is, as the sly title indicates, a delicious satire on Victorian morality. (The play led to the name ‘Ernest’ becoming temporarily unfashionable.) It has a masterfully farcical plot and almost every scene contains dazzling paradoxes such as:

As his play was packing out the Haymarket Theatre in London, Wilde fell like Lucifer. He was accused by the father of his young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, of being a ‘sodomite’. Wilde filed a slander suit, which he lost, and was immediately prosecuted for ‘offences against public decency’. He was found guilty and imprisoned for two years’ hard labour, becoming prisoner C.3.3. After his release, Wilde wrote ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ (1898). There is nothing remotely dandyish in the poem, which ends bleakly, with bitter criticism of the lover who had betrayed him:

In prison Wilde wrote an apology for his life,
De Profundis
(‘from the depths’). A version was published in 1905, but the full text, details of it being considered scandalous, was not published until the 1960s.

On his release Wilde took refuge in France, without his wife and children, who had never figured much in his public life. He died in 1900, as the Victorian era, which he had done so much to offend and make fun of, was winding down. Near the end of his life, he said: ‘To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.’ Oscar Wilde survives in literary history as a writer who indeed made his life a fine work of art and left some literature that was equally worth our attention. A petition in 2012 to have him pardoned posthumously has, as I write, received no response from the government.

‘Dandyism’ in France was elevated into a manifesto by the poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), in an essay in his collection
The Painter of Modern Life
(1863). (Interestingly, Baudelaire was the first writer to define ‘modernism’, the subject of Chapter 28.)
Dandyism, claims Baudelaire, is ‘a kind of religion’ – aestheticism, art in all things. He too would see Jesus Christ as a poet. It goes well beyond fashionable attire:

There is, Baudelaire discerned, a core of sadness in the ‘superior’ mind of the dandy:

Melancholy, because dandyism ‘flowers’ when things are coming to an end, ‘decaying’. We are living in a ‘corpse time’, but even in decay beauty can be found; poetry can be made. The cult of ‘decadence’ was picked up by many other writers in France. But as with Baudelaire, it meant a life of great risk: early death from various kinds of overindulgence, prosecution by authorities, poverty. Excess was the only way, even if it led to self-destruction. ‘Get drunk!’ instructed Baudelaire: ‘So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.’

The pose (‘default setting’, as we would say) that Baudelaire advocated for the poet was ‘
ennui
’. The English ‘boredom’ does not catch the flavour of the word precisely. The poet, Baudelaire elsewhere instructed, should be a
flâneur
. That term too is not easily translated into English. A ‘saunterer’, watching the life of the streets as it flows past, is as close as we can come. Baudelaire characterised the
flâneur
as a ‘passionate spectator’:

The American writer of this period who most perfectly fits Baudelaire's description of the modern poet is Walt Whitman (1819–92). The title of one of his poems, ‘Manhattan Streets I Saunter'd, Pondering’, could, with a change of metropolis, be one of Baudelaire's own. In his ‘sauntering’, writes Whitman, he ponders ‘on time, space, reality’. The meaning of these great abstractions are to be found in the buzzing maelstrom of the city streets. Whitman and Baudelaire did not know each other or each other's work. But they are clearly collaborators in the same literary movement – a movement that was shifting literature out of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, and into full-blown modernism (Chapter 28).

Whitman called his poems ‘songs of myself’. It fits neatly with Wilde's belief that his life was his most perfect work of art. The writer who pursued this idea to the most artistic of conclusions was Marcel Proust (1871–1922), in his massive autobiographical novel
À la recherche du temps perdu
(1913–27; published in English from 1922 as
Remembrance of Things Past
). Proust starts from the view that life is lived forward but understood backward; and at some point in our lives, what is behind is more interesting than what is in front. The novel, which took fifteen years and seven volumes to complete, is of all things triggered by the taste of a madeleine cake. ‘One day in winter’, the narrator (manifestly Proust) writes,

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

T
ENNYSON

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).