The Book of Lost Books (23 page)

After so many fits and starts, in internal, eternal exile, the ways of God will be justified to man. The English will get their epic.

Paradise Lost
very nearly never appeared at all. It was published in 1667, the year after the Great Fire of London. Many printers' and booksellers' premises around St. Paul's had suffered particularly badly—indeed, the manuscript and every printed copy of John Ogilby's epic poem
The Carolies
were now so much ash. Milton's work survived the conflagration.

Its afterlife makes even
Paradise Lost
a curiously lost work in itself. The literary world wanted it to, well, go away.

John Dryden huffily acknowledged its greatness, but denied it the laurels on a technicality.

As for Mr Milton, whom we all admire with so much justice, his subject is not that of an heroic poem, properly so called. His design is the losing of our happiness; his event is not prosperous, like that of all other epic works; his heavenly machines are many, and his human persons are but two.

Moreover, in an almost petulant exercise in dumbing-down, Dryden turned it into a stage opera, entitled
The State of Innocence and the Fall
of Man.
Dryden rewrote the blank verse as rhyming couplets, though he did ask Milton's permission. “You may tag my verses” is all that remains of an exceptionally curious literary meeting.

Richard Bentley (1662–1742) was a formidable scholar of Latin and Greek, most renowned for conclusively ending the debate about whether the
Epistles of Phalaris
were genuine (they weren't). He decided to turn his copious erudition to
Paradise Lost,
and became convinced that the true work had been mangled by Milton's soft-witted daughters' attempts at taking dictation, and the slapdash carelessness of his editors. After all, a blind poet cannot check his proofs. Take, for example, the closing lines:

They hand in hand, with wand'ring steps and slow, Through Eden made their solitary way.

Ridiculous! How could
two
people be solitary? What Milton meant to say was:

Then hand in hand, with social steps their way Through Eden took with heav'nly comfort cheer'd.

Even if Bentley hadn't managed to annoy Alexander Pope, by slighting his abilities as a translator of Homer, he was destined, just for this small editing job alone, for a place in the expanded edition of Pope's
Dunciad.

William Lauder, who died in 1771, was at the opposite end of the social spectrum, but in a similar line of work to Mr. Bentley. A one-legged Scottish classics tutor, he also possessed a monomaniacal hatred of
Paradise
Lost.
In
An Essay into Milton's Use and Abuse of the Moderns
of 1750, he sensationally showed how Milton had plagiarized from Taubmann, Staphorstius, Masenius, and other little-known contemporary Latinists. In fact, Lauder had translated
Paradise Lost
into Latin and then inserted his lines into the works of the said authors. He also included an advertisement for his services as a tutor. Once the forgery was revealed, the publishers decided that “we shall for the future sell his book ONLY as a masterpiece of fraud, which the public may be supplied with at 1s6d stitched.”

Even Samuel Johnson managed to lard his biography of Milton with caveats. “The original deficience cannot be supplied,” he argued, continuing with damning short sentences: “The want of human interest is always felt.
Paradise Lost
is one of the books the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure.”

And perhaps even Milton felt some resentment to his poem. Despite the fact that he had written the English epic, when the countless other attempts—the risible
Alfred
and
Eliza
of Blackmore, the countless
Wellingtoniad
s and
Alexandriad
s—molder on shelves; perhaps he would have preferred power to poetry. If the Devil had taken up John Milton unto an high place, and offered, on the one hand, the laurel of posterity, and on the other, the chance for his Commonwealth to continue beyond Cromwell's death, the extirpation of monarchy, the collapse of Catholicism, and England transformed into a global beacon for his ideals—what would the old Iconoclast have chosen?

Sir Thomas Urquhart

{1611–1660}

SOLDIER, GENTLEMAN, TRAVELER, mathematician, genealogist, poet, translator, linguistic philosopher, and, possibly, madman: Sir Thomas Urquhart had many talents, but by far the greatest was for hyperbole.

Thomas was the eldest son of the impecunious laird of Cromarty. He studied at King's College, Aberdeen, and then embarked on a grand tour of Europe, where he was conspicuous for defending the honor of Scotland and acquiring books for his library, a collection he later called “a complete nosegay of flowers which in my travels I have gathered out of the gardens of above sixteen several kingdoms.” On his return, apart from unsuccessful attempts to alleviate the debts and placate the creditors of his father, he traveled to London, to the court of Charles I. Urquhart began to fashion himself as a Cavalier wit, writing 1,103 epigrams entitled
Apollo and the Muses
in thirteen weeks in 1640, and publishing a further 134
Epigrams: Divine and Moral.
He was knighted in 1641, and returned to Scotland after the death of his father, barely having time to dash off his impenetrable treatise applying Napier's logarithms to trigonometry. Among the more extravagant claims of the
Trissotetras, or
a most exquisite table for resolving triangles
was that a student could, using Urquhart's method, learn a year's worth of mathematical formulae in the space of seven weeks.

With the outbreak of the Civil War and the execution of Charles I, Urquhart rallied troops for a Royalist counteroffensive. He had already earned the enmity of the Protestant Covenanters after a skirmish at Turriff, purportedly the first blood to be shed in the defense of the Solemn League and Covenant. He was cautioned by the General Assembly for his “dangerous opinions,” but nonetheless hastened to Charles II, and joined his army in attempting an invasion of Cromwell's England in 1651.

After the defeat of the Royalists at the Battle of Worcester, Urquhart was taken to the Tower of London as a traitor, but seems to have enjoyed some degree of liberty. While in prison he petitioned Cromwell's government with various claims, including that he had a secret “advantageous to the nation,” which he would make known on his release. He translated Rabelais, and compiled three fantastical books—the
Pantochronochanon,
the
Ekskubalauron,
and the
Logopandecteision—
before being exiled around 1655. He died, in 1660, on hearing the news of the Restoration of Charles II, “in a fit of excessive laughter.”

So what were these strange tomes? The
Ekskubalauron,
also known as
The Jewel,
contains material from the
Pantochronochanon,
Urquhart's genealogy of himself from Adam, and the
Logopandecteision,
his proposal for a universal language, as well as including a panegyric on Scotland in the character of a polymathic soldier and scholar, the Admirable Crichton. In his translation of Rabelais, Urquhart indulges in copious expansions and erudite exaggerations: for example, when Rabelais gives nine examples of onomatopoeic animal noises, Urquhart extends this to seventy-one. His version is seventy thousand words longer than the original. Stylistically, his sentences stretch like two mirrors facing each other, warping to incorporate classical neologisms, demotic asides, and a plethora of quirks and curiosities. To call it “Shandy-esque,” “Carlyleish,” or “Joycean” is to obscure Urquhart's originality, and underplay his peculiar grandiloquence. As Rev. John Willock wrote, “only a mind like his own could trace the maze of its windings and turnings, and fathom the depth of its eccentricity.”

The
Pantochronochanon
shows how influential the Urquharts have always been. Tracing their descent from Adam's third son, Seth, rather than through Cain, Urquhart's forebears have an uncanny knack for being tangentially involved in world history. His great × 109 grandmother, Termuth, found Moses in the rushes. Uthork, his great × 66 grandfather, was the general for the mythic Fergus I of Scotland. He can, he claims, “produce testimonies of Arabic, Greek and Latin,” which will be as irrefutable as the
Elements
of Euclid.

Similarly, in the
Logopandecteision,
he outlines his universal language, but withholds the grammar and vocabulary he has already developed. The language creates a one-to-one correspondence between words and things, as in Leibniz's scheme, and each word, being built up from syllables, contains in itself its location in the scheme of things: as if the scientific Latin name of an organism, containing its phylum, genus, and species, could be compressed into a word of no more than seven syllables. Urquhart's image is of a map,

so many cities which are subdivided into streets, they againe into lanes, those into houses, these into stories wherof each room standeth for a word; and all these so methodically, that whoso observeth my precepts thereanent shall at the first hearing of a word know to what city it belongeth and . . . after a most exact prying into all its letters, finding the street, lane, house, story and room thereby denoted, he punctually hit upon the very proper thing it represents by its most specifical signification.

Not only can everything be named; every sound the mouth can make is made meaningful.

Precision is not the least of the virtues of Urquhartese. Each word “hath at least ten several
synonymas
” and the language has “a wonderful facility . . . in making of anagrams.” In his true, hyperbolic style, his language outdoes every other tongue, having eleven genders, seven moods, ten cases, and “four voices, although it was never heard that ever any other language had above three.” The names of soldiers express their exact rank, and the names of stars contain their latitude and longitude, in degrees and minutes. Urquhart could, if let free, single-handedly rebuild Babel.

Before he is written off as a harmless lunatic, it is worth mentioning that Urquhart does express some linguistic truths. He understands that translation is, by its nature, impossible, and that “were . . . languages stript of what is not originally their own, we should not be able . . . to purchase so much as our breakfast in market.” Though it is highly speculative, and possibly satirical, it is not the work of an unversed charlatan.

Why were the proofs of a universal history and the primer of the universal language denied to the world? Partly, of course, because they were never written. The whole phantasmagoria is an elaborate charade designed to win him his freedom and announce his fame. But he did lose a large number of manuscripts after the Battle of Worcester. Even if they did not contain the Elixir of Eternal Life and the Specifications for an Engine to Travel to the Stars, they would have been shot through with his own quintessenced and cup-shotten mokes, his serpegiar bliteri and heteroclite idiosyncrasy, as he himself would say. It seems appropriate to let the good knight tell his own tale of misfortune, when, after the rout of the regal party at Worcester, two swindlers and plunderers in Master Spilsbury's house find nothing . . .

but manuscripts in folio to the quantity of sixscore and eight quires and a half, divided into six hundred fourty and two quinternions and upwards . . . they in a trice carried all whatever els was in the room away save those papers, which they then threw down on the floor as unfit for their use. Yet immediately thereafter, when upon carts the aforesaid baggage was put to be transported to the country, and that by the example of many hundreds of both horse and foot whom they had loaded with spoil, they, . . . apprehending how useful the paper might be unto them, went back for it and bore it straight away; which done, to every one of those their camards whom they met with in the streets, they gave as much thereof for packeting up of raisins, figs, dates, almonds, caraway and other such like dry confections and other ware as was requisite; who, doing the same themselves, did together with others kindle pipes of tobacco with a great part thereof and threw all the remainder upon the streets save so much as they deemed necessary for inferiour employments and posteriour uses.

Of those dispersedly-rejected bundles of paper, some were gathered up by grocers, druggists, chandlers, pie-makers or such as stood in need of any cartapaciatory utensil and put in present service to the utter undoing of all the writing thereof both in its matter and order.

Abraham Cowley

{1618–1667}

LIKE MANY A child prodigy, Abraham Cowley found his middle age to be fraught with the dark memories of dashed hopes. The seventh son of a posthumous father, he had certainly flourished quickly. Before the age of ten he had found, and read, a copy of Spenser's
Faerie Queene
in his mother's chamber, a fortuitous discovery, since the bulk of her books were theological treatises. Enthusiasm soon turned to imitation, and by the age of eleven he had composed and published two poems. By 1633, he had written sufficient verses for them to be collected together as
PoeticalBlossoms.
The teenage writer went on to produce a pastoral play,
Love's Riddle,
and a Latin comedy,
Naufragium Joculare,
while at Cambridge. The stage seemed set for his erudition, wit, and gentle amiability to secure for him the position of foremost writer of the age.

The Civil War, however, intervened. With his “heart set wholly upon letters, I went to the university, but was soon torn from thence by that violent public storm, which would suffer nothing to stand where it did, but rooted up every plant, even from the princely cedar to me, the hyssop.” As an adherent of the monarchy and Charles I, Cowley moved from Parliamentarian Cambridge to Royalist Oxford, dashing off a satire on the king's foes entitled
The Puritan and the Papist.
But, as he would later recollect in biting understatement, “a warlike, various and a tragical age is the best to
write of
but the worst to
write in.
”

Between 1644 and 1654, Cowley was based on the Continent, predominantly in the service of Lord Jermyn, the secretary to Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I. He continued to publish, with
The Mistress
in 1647 and another comedy,
The Guardian,
in 1650; most of his time, however, was taken up with coding and deciphering documents for his master and correspondence between Henrietta Maria and Charles, as the pitched battles on English soil were superseded by espionage and intrigue. Between continents, Cowley undertook several undercover missions, to the Netherlands, Jersey, and Scotland. In 1655, he returned to England, apparently to live in semiretirement and discreetly provide occasional reports on the state of the nation to the exiled court. He was arrested as a Royalist spy, in London, and released on bail of £1,000.

It has been suspected that Cowley struck a deal with the establishment of the day. The seventeenth-century academic gossip Antony à Wood maintained there was an encomium by Cowley on Cromwell, though these lines have never surfaced. What is certain is that Cowley did retire, eventually to Kent, where he seems to have been held in slight suspicion after the Restoration of Charles II (despite an enthusiastic ode welcoming the king back). He became a doctor of physic, and spent the last years of his life composing a Latin poem in six books on herbs, flowers, and fruit trees: from poetical blossoms to botany.

What caused Cowley's change, from debonair poet at the heart of the political system to secluded naturalist? A snapshot of his state of mind can be found in the remarkable Preface to his
Collected Works
of 1656, published the year after his release from prison.

“My desire has been for some years past,” he wrote, “... to retire my self to some of our
American Plantations.
” A comprehensible enough inclination for a man slung in jail the instant he stepped back on the native soil, which had been soaked with his king's and colleagues' blood. But throughout the Preface, Cowley's stance toward himself as a poet, and toward poetry in general, is almost pathological. What happened in the past was over and never to be repeated or explored. His
Collected
Works
was, he claimed, “a little
Tomb
of
Marble.
” “To make my self absolutely dead in a
Poetical
capacity, my resolution at present, is never to exercise any more that faculty,” he wrote and, when asking his critics to look kindly on his efforts, maintained, “I may make a just claim to the undoubted priviledge of
Deceased
Poets.”

This literary death-wish, this “encourage[ment] to learn the Art of Oblivion,” is not without its psychosexual undertones. He was “made a poet as irremediably as a child is made a eunuch.” Moreover, “as the marriage of infants do but rarely prosper, so no man ought to wonder at the diminution or decay of my affection to Poesy, to which I had contracted myself so much under age.” The poem “Destiny” offers another, bizarre image: the Muse:

circumcised my tender soul, and thus she spake:
“Thou of my church shall be;
Hate and renounce” said she
“Wealth, honour, pleasures, all the world for me.
Thou neither great at court, nor in the war,
Nor at th'Exchange shalt be, nor at the wrangling Bar.
Content thyself with this small, barren praise
That neglected verse does raise.”

Cowley's description of the poetical life here sounds more like an undesirable designation than a restful and expected tapering. “I can no longer write” was an adequate cover story for “I will not longer write.”

He included, in the 1656
Collected Poems,
four books of an epic poem which he had “neither
Leisure
hitherto, nor
. . . Appetite
at present to finish”; and though he may have subsequently had time, desire did not return over the last eleven years of his life. He described his abandoning of the poem with characteristic sly self-deprecation: “men commonly play not out the game, when it is evident that they can win it, but lay down their cards and take up what they have won.” Nonetheless, he included an analysis of his intentions that would have a significant impact on English poetry.

The Davideis
was to be an epic poem on the life of the biblical King David. He “designed [it] into
Twelve Books . . .
after the
pattern
of our Master
Virgil.
” Fidelity to his model even led Cowley to include hemistichs, or half-lines, since such lines appear in
The Aeneid:
he seems not to have realized that they are evidence that Virgil's poem too is unfinished, or at least unperfected. Cowley clearly had the poem plotted out in no small detail. It would encompass

many noble and fertile Arguments behind; as, the barbarous cruelty of
Saul
to the
Priests
at
Nob,
the several flights and escapes of
David,
with the manner of his living in the
Wilderness,
the
Funeral
of
Samuel,
the love of
Abigail,
the sacking of
Ziglag,
the loss and recovery of
David's
wives from the Amalekites, the
Witch
of
Endor,
the war with
Philistia,
and the
Battel
of
Gilboa;
all of which I meant to interweave upon several occasions, with most of the illustrious
Stories
of the
Old Testament,
and to embellish with the most remarkable
Antiquities
of the
Jews.

The poem would end, not with David's anointment as king of Israel, but with his “most Poetical and excellent
Elegie . . .
on the death of
Saul
and
Jonathan.
”

Poetry, Cowley argued, in the ungodly time of Cromwell as much as in the pagan past, had been usurped by the Devil, and needed to be redeemed. “Why will not the actions of
Sampson
afford as plentiful matter as the
Labors
of
Hercules
? . . . Does not the passage of
Moses
and the
Israelites
into the
Holy Land,
yield incomparably more Poetical variety, than the voyages of
Ulysses
or
Aeneas
?”

In an astonishing moment of clarity, Cowley bows away from his poem, and nods to the future simultaneously. “I shall be ambitious of no other fruit from this weak and imperfect attempt of mine, but the opening of a way to the courage and industry of some other persons, who may be better able to perform it thoroughly and successfully.” Step forward, John Milton.

Cowley resembles a poetic mutant, a hopeful monster in the evolution of English poetry: he developed new sensitivities, better strategies; he adapted himself to an obvious niche that, unfortunately, did not yet exist. He was the new, right kind of poet, in the wrong old place, time, and uniform.

His
Collected Poems
is a pruning of his output. “I have cast away all such pieces as I wrote during the time of the late troubles . . . as among others,
Three Books
of
The Civil War
it self.” Book I of this appeared in 1679, the other two were discovered in the mid-1980s. The poem was an attempt to narrate the conflict between Roundheads and Cavaliers as if it were an epic already, and with the epic's foregone conclusion that the good would triumph. God blessed the king, and the Devil inspired Cromwell. Life, however, took a different turn from literary precedent. Cowley dismissed his political epic brusquely, saying, “it is folly to weave laurels for the conquered.”

One wonders if Milton realized the irony: that the epic would always be written in political exile. His
Paradise Lost
was composed under the autocratic rule of Charles II, not the government of Cromwell. John Dryden would only translate
The Aeneid
after James II was forced to cede the British throne to William III. Alexander Pope put
The Iliad
into English at a time when the king couldn't even speak the language. James McPherson's forged epic poem
Fingal, by Ossian
was launched after Culloden, when the Gaelic it was supposedly written in was being actively suppressed. Epic, for the British poet, is always tinged with elegy.