Walnuts & Wine

Nearly everyone who ever knew him, loved Edward Fitzgerald. His immediate family was a rather painful exception, though he loved even that difficult crew as best he could. His friends, though, were his life. Their wives did not always have a share in this mutual admiration. A few deeply resented his interference, and not without cause. Fitzgerald could be a bit too attentive to the boys. Still, Fitz did his best to befriend even the most obstreperous among his mates' mates, and most were eventually won over, to one degree or another. But even the patience of his dearest friends could tried by the intensity of his attentions. He was never demanding, but he could be too generous with his time, his affection, his coin and his advice. He was probably at his worst with fellow poets. For a man who actually produced next to nothing in the way of original verse, at least until, ironically enough, he set seriously about translating other poets, Fitzgerald never hesitated to express his opinion of his friends' original work. He was unusually encouraging, actually had excellent taste, and could be an exact and inspired critic, but he was perhaps a little too eager to help. He knew many if not most of the major poets of his day, many well before their fame. With some, like the brothers Tennyson, he was intimately acquainted. He was always perfectly sincere in his appreciation, and did anything he could to promote the work of writers and artists he recognized as being his superiors. Whatever their gifts or accomplishments, for Fitzgerald, friends deserved his honest opinion, and he expected no less from them. Not everyone was obliged, always.

By the time his fabulously wealthy mother died, Fitzgerald was a very rich man, and quite comfortable in a more modest way even before then. He could afford to be generous. He had all the time in the world to read, and was genuinely keen to know everything about anything that interested his friends. Unlike others similarly situated, he was always willing to learn, and to be taught, and he encouraged and cultivated talent wherever encountered, and however situated. He was just as likely to befriend a poor man as an aristocrat, throughout his long life. Much of his advice may have been presumptuous, and even wrong-headed, but it was never condescending. He was quite rightly humble as to his own gifts as a writer. He fully appreciated the limitations of his own education, preferences and experience. He lived in great simplicity for most of his life, only indulging himself in books and paintings -- of which he was no very good judge -- and such music as he usually made himself, though he loved going to concerts. He depended on his friends for much of the variety he otherwise would never have had in his life. Age did not much matter. He easily made friends not just among his contemporaries, but in the previous generation as well. Even more often, he sought the company of men sometimes considerably younger than himself, with gifts quite different from his. He did everything he could to encourage these younger friends in the pursuit of their own ambitions. In fact, with more than one, he made their interests entirely his own. With one handsome boy, Fitzgerald took so active an interest in his studies of Persian, as to ask his friend's help in learning the language himself. It was under the tutelage of this much younger friend, that Fitzgerald first read the poet whose name is still linked with his own. It must be admitted that in this instance, and in others throughout Fitzgerald's life, there was an element of largely if not wholly unrequited romance in many of his most intense friendships. What of it? It might fairly be said that we owe Fitzgerald's classic translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam to a crush on a boy. But Fitzgerald's knack for friendship, one might almost say his great need for it, was not limited to handsome lads, poets or no. One of the dearest friends to Fitzgerald in old age was his faithful correspondent, the great actress and abolitionist, Fanny Kemble, and one of Fitzgerald's best friends, nearer to home, was a local Anglican priest, named George Crabbe, the son and biographer of the poet of that name.

This friendship resulted in one of Fitzgerald's most curious literary interventions. In hopes of reviving interest in the older poet's work, Fitzgerald spent some time and considerable effort editing and abridging one of Crabbe last books for republication. Tales of the Hall, when originally published in 1819, had had some success. By the time of the elder George Crabbe's death in 1834, the fashion in poetry had changed and Crabbe was already being dismissed as old fashioned and less than properly "poetic." Fitzgerald amended a new title, Readings from Crabbe, to the little book, and trimmed it, interjecting explanatory prose to patch over the pruning, in the hope that new readers might be attracted to what Fitzgerald thought best and most characteristic in Crabbes' work. The resulting curious little volume, which I recently had reprinted for me on the bookstore's Espresso Book Machine, Homer, Fitzgerald had privately printed in 1879, at his own expense, though he wasn't able to interest anyone in distributing or selling it for him until 1882. In a letter, Fitzgerald explained "I can gain nothing from the Public, whether of Praise or Pelf; neither of which was my object -- which was simply to try and gain a few readers to this awkward old genius." I've read now Fitzgerald's bowdlerized version, and the original, and I can't say that Fitzgerald did Crabbe any favor. Still, it was reading Fitzgerald's letters that sent me to read Crabbe for the first time, so in a round about way, and if only with me, Fitzgerald has accomplished something like what he determined to do, which was to find a new reader for George Crabbe.

Crabbe was a popular and respected poet in his day, an early and life-long favorite of Walter Scott's, for example, and admired by Byron, Wordsworth and many others besides. The general consensus, even among his admirers, was that his was a most uneven production, and that even the best of him tended to be be mixed in almost equal portion with the worst. Fitzgerald, in his estimation of Crabbe's latter poems, was by no means making an eccentric or unkind estimation of their worth, when he took it upon himself to try and improve on the originals.

Having read in the letters so much about not only about Fitzgerald's friendship for father and son, but of his interest in improving and preserving in so unusual a way what he thought best in the older man's poetry, I determined to find and read something of Crabbe's poetry for myself, not just Fitzgerald's reworking of Crabbe's "Tales," but all his stuff, as well as the biography of the poet by his son, Fitzgerald's great friend. Letters, more than any other literary form, including biography, tend to make such missions attractive to me. In getting to know an individual so well, as only the best letters allow, one wants then to know something more of what they knew, of the books they read and mentioned, the writers they admired and the friends they made. No one's letters since Lamb's have provided me with so long a list of interesting possibilities for further reading. Thanks to my access to the wonder that is the bookstore's EBM, as regular reader's here will remember, I needn't wait for luck and my regular trawling in used bookstores to gratify these impulses to further reading anymore, but can instead simply pop the new name into the searchable database of Google Books and have a stack like that pictured above, produced for me in less time and at less expense than would have been required to place an order online with a bookstore like Powell's -- assuming even Powell's might have any of these books in stock -- which they didn't when I checked. Now as it happens, I've since found a very nice blue Oxford edition of Crabbe's poetry, for quite a reasonable price, just down the road at my favorite local used bookstore, but all that's meant is that my library is now better by a copy for home and another, cheaper paperback copy to lug roughly about in my briefcase.

And so, I've been feasting on a big mess o' Crabbe for more than a week now. I did read the son's biography, which is a charming document, full of affection, delicacy and a rare sympathy for both his father's virtues and his faults. To supplement and expand a bit on this, I had the later Victorian critic, Alfred Ainger's, slim volume on the poet, part of The English Men of Letters series on which I have come to rely for their concision, good style and good humor. Ainger's opinion of Crabbe differs only in a few particulars from Fitzgerald's, though neither man would seem to have had quite enough distance from the revolution wrought by Coleridge and Wordsworth, or the still fashionable taste in Ainger's day for Tennyson, to appreciate just how much a reader in the 21st Century might not care about what is or is not proper poetry in Crabbe. On one crucial point, namely the idea of elevating subjects and beauty as the only fit stuff from which the best poetry is made, the contemporary reader has blessedly been freed. One of the most consistent complaints of Crabbe, from his immediate contemporaries down to influential later critics like Leslie Stephens, was that he wrote too much about unedifying subjects: bleak coastal landscapes, poor and often ignorant people, leading small and often unhappy lives. Not a few of Crabbe's Tales, including his most famous, "Peter Grimes," from which the opera was taken, involve a kind of mean, senseless violence which, despite Crabbe's entirely orthodox Christianity, struck many of his Victorian readers as unsavory. For the reader today, there's an obvious irony in this, as it is the poet's piety, and his life-long devotion to the poetic forms of the earlier masters, like Dryden & Pope, rather than any perceptible vulgarity in Crabbe's language or distaste for his humble subjects, that might make reading his rhymed couplets a bit of a chore.

I'm glad I read 'round George Crabbe's poetry before I undertook to read much of it myself. Having the context for what and why he wrote as he did, allowed me to appreciate just how well he did what he did. Think of it: one of Crabbe's first enthusiastic critics, and an early editor was Edmund Burke, and through that connection Crabbe came to know and be advised by no less a figure than Johnson. Of humble origins, and limited education, Crabbe never the less, through such friends, found not only his place and employment as a clergyman, but also was able to establish a reputation that saw him though many years without a single published poem until the most productive period of his middle age, by which time he was much admired by Wordsworth! George Crabbe in fact lived long enough to win the admiration of other poets down even to the middle of the century after his birth, and to be subject to the truly touching efforts to sustain his reputation made by his son's friend, Fitzgerald. Tastes change however, and as I've already mentioned, by the time of Crabbe's death, his failure to experiment with form, his refusal to abandon what now seems most obviously to have been the style that suited him best, left him increasingly without a popular audience. Ainger makes the point that there is probably no other major poet in English who was so quickly and completely forgotten.

Looking for Crabbe among my anthologies, there's very little to be found. In the first place, narrative poetry has almost completely disappeared. Then there is his failure to write the kind of lines, as Pope so preeminently did, that might survive as aphorisms independent of poetry. Crabbe was not much of a philosopher, it's true. His ideas, like his religion, were entirely conventional and very much what one might expect of a country clergyman. Fitzgerald blamed Stephens for establishing the opinion that Crabbe lacked not only wit but humor, and Fitzgerald was right and Stephens quite wrong about this. Crabbe, like Cowper, had not only a good heart, but a good eye for amusing and telling detail, though unlike Cowper, it may be fair to say that Crabbe had not a specially good ear, either for dialect or a joke, or even for the felicitous word, so far as the music of the thing is concerned.

Starting Crabbe then from what was a pretty low opinion in anticipation, imagine my delight in finding the reading not only enjoyable as often quite powerful narrative, but as good poetry more often than not as well. I won't pretend to any expertise in this, but as just a common reader I was shocked at how accessible and interesting, and how superbly managed nearly all of Crabbe's verse seemed to me. If a line was occasionally misshapen to accommodate the rhyme, even that can have it's interest, as such dogged devotion to form, while sometimes producing a clumsy result, does suggest a puzzler's pleasure in making a thing work, however imperfectly. As sins go, this seems more venal than mortal, at least to my enjoyment. And there is so much to enjoy in Crabbe's stories of petty thieves, bad masters, broken loves, country courting, murder, in his portraits of fishermen, farmers, minor clerics and distracted landlords, in his surprisingly detailed portrait of a place and time and way of life now all but altogether vanished. If I can not but find the consistent invocation of an unconvincingly benevolent deity anything more than understandable, and forgivable in the poet/priest, I hardly think I need waste any time here is suggesting why. Does such religious certainty undo the power of Milton? Or the pleasures of reading Gerard Manley Hopkins? I don't mean to equate Crabbe with either as a poet. I'm simply suggesting that the reader need not be in complete sympathy with the philosophy, let alone the theology of the poet to enjoy reading the poems. And Fitzgerald was right, there are great things to be found in Crabbe. Ainger says that Crabbe introduced pity into English poetry. I think that perfect. Whatever motivation the poet may have had as a religious man, the result is often quite moving because of the honesty and the genuine sympathy with which even the most mean existence described in these stories is treated. That, to my entirely secular way of thinking, makes Crabbe a better and if you will, a more inspired Christian, than most of the poets usually entered under that heading.

Fitzgerald said of Crabbe, "... I believe every thinking man will like him more as he grows older" and that may go a long way to explaining why I have found myself liking the old boy so much that I intend now to finish reading the whole of him. However slipshod some of his lines may be, however predictably exaggerated his language or muddy his sense at some times, however conventional and antique his sentiments, however unhappy his Toryism, and however unconvincing his God, Crabbe's heart, and his soul seem to me exceptionally fine. The poetry he used to express his sympathy rather than explicate his sympathies seems to me just as fine, and sometimes as fine as any I've ever read. Maybe it is just such a sympathetic personality that one looks for in the reading to be done in middle age. My own youth I spent as much in the search of novelty and innovation as anything else. Perfectly good thing for a young person to do. Now, I usually find such things annoyingly demanding. I'd rather know, and respect, the craftsmanship of something with which I might not wholly agree, said recognizably well, than chase after the meaning in something with which, if I could figure it out, I might concur more readily. Fitzgerald described Crabbe's poetry as being of "the walnuts and wine" type, and that, it seems, is very much to my taste as well now, as it happens.

Like Fitzgerald, when he put out his private edition of Crabbe's last "Tales," I hold out little hope of actually inducing anyone else to try Crabbe by writing about him here. I do so really more to explain why I've been writing so little of any substance here for so long.

I've been reading George Crabbe, and I must get back to him.

Daily Dose

From Crabbe, by Alfred Ainger

A NEW FORCE

"What made Crabbe a new force in English poetry, was that in his verse Pity appears, after a long oblivion, as the true antidote to Sentimentalism."

From Chapter III, Friendship with Burke, 1781 - 1783

Essays in Earnest and Otherwise

I have in mind my next order for the bookstore's new Espresso Book Machine, but I'm anticipating a problem. From what I can see, looking at the database for the affordable Google book, I would get only the first of two volumes. Inexplicably, this would seem to be the standard way of Google books, at least to date, with multiple volume books. Having been burnt now more than once, I am chary of hoping for better from the Google folks anytime soon. Still, The price of the reprint from one of the sources other than Google is absurdly high. For that kind of money, I might almost buy a used copy, even with the shipping. So, for the moment, I'm stymied.

The truth is, I know too little of the book's author, Alfred Ainger (1837-1904) and about the book, in two volumes, of his Lectures and Essays (1905) to make this investment lightly. The little I know of Ainger's biography might as easily be found anywhere online, but can be summarized briefly enough. Son of a London architect, he took holy orders at Cambridge, and, with a becoming gradualism, he slowly rose up to become Canon of Bristol Cathedral and "chaplain-in-ordinary" to Queen Victoria and King Edward VII, whatever that may mean. About all that, I couldn't care less. I might have his reprinted Sermons Preached in the Temple Church for roughly the cost of his essays. I'm sure his sermons are perfectly lovely sermons, as sermons go, but I can't imagine why I would want them. It is not, as it were, Ainger's day-job that interests me. Like Sydney Smith's, Ainger's clerical career might entertainingly have been treated by Trollope, but as it wasn't, I don't think I need to read anything much more about that. But Ainger, again like Smith, was known for his wit, and his literary work, as well as his collar, and in that I am most interested.

Ainger wrote, among other things, a life of Thomas Hood, and for Morley's "English Men of Letters" series, he wrote two more biographies: a brief life of the poet Crabbe, which I haven't read, and another, of Charles Lamb, which, of course, I have. (The best biography of Lamb, to my mind, is still E. V. Lucas', which came later and was the better for what was then much new scholarship on the subject, and for being allowed greater length, less reserve, and more scope of quotation. In two fat volumes, Lucas, with great candor and unabashed admiration, seamlessly stitched up a great part of the letters, with all the best anecdotes, and the new research of his day, to make something as nearly like the company of the man as might ever be possible. It is a favorite book of mine, and with his edition of Lamb's letters, perhaps the best thing Lucas ever did.) Ainger's little book was the first book about Lamb that I read, and as such, it has it's own place in my library, but I find I turn to it, in preference even to the Lucas, because it is the best and easiest in which to find the simplest history of Lamb's life. Like the other volumes I've read in Morley's series of brief lives, Ainger's book is an elegant and well-made thing; clear, concise and not much concerned with much other than the subject. History and criticism come into it, but only as needed. Wordsworth, Hazlitt and the rest of Lamb's famous acquaintance and friends, for example, are included, but are never allowed more than what may be due them as having been occasionally present and almost always fondly regarded. The lives of Lamb's friends, more perhaps than any other such circle in English literature, other than perhaps Dr. Johnson's, were the stuff of literary history. In Ainger's biography though, even the most famous of these are kept in their place, at Lamb's table, in his company, and are not allowed to displace the subject that most interests his biographer, and me. This is particularly true of Coleridge, as perhaps Lamb's oldest, and dearest friend other than his sister Mary, and Ainger's refusal to be distracted by the noisy genius is all the more notable as even Lamb found his friend tended to overwhelm even the most distinguished company, and become the focus of any room he was in. Ainger keeps even Coleridge in his place. Ainger's book then is not "the life and times," but simply, Charles Lamb. That is it's chief virtue, though it is also pithy, and as touching and amusing, in it's way, as as any such brief life may and should be. For all the limitations of the space in which he had to write, and with all the equally confining discretion and of the true Victorian, Ainger's Lamb is recognizably both the Elia beloved of generations of his readers, and the more melancholy figure as much now remembered for the tragedies in his life, as for the good humor and good company he kept in all but the worst of times. Moreover, it is worth noting, that Ainger's edition of Lamb, in twelve volumes, was the first good one, and the one from which all subsequent editions, including Lucas', derive. Whatever it's flaws and omissions, Ainger's Lamb is largely the Lamb still read, and his life of Lamb, still worth reading.

The idea that I might read, might need, the Canon's other Lectures and Essays came to me tonight when I had occasion to consult his Charles Lamb. I was curious to find some concise explanation for Lamb's adoption of the name Elia for his most famous essays. Elsewhere tonight in my reading, I came across an unattributed quotation on this subject, in David Cecil's A Portrait of Charles Lamb. (The quote comes from Lamb's essay, "The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple," an essay with which Cecil may well have assumed any reader of his book to already be familiar. Who else, after all, would read Cecil's book, but someone with Elia already at his elbow? It is worth remembering that such assumptions could still be made, as late even as when Cecil wrote about Lamb, in the early 1970s, without any suggestion of authorial indifference to the rules of good scholarship, or to his reader's less perfect recollection of the subject's famous words. Someone like Cecil might still assume, even in my lifetime as a reader, that the curious, if unsure of what the critic thought a familiar quotation, would, if curious enough, be able to look it up in the original. Not the same thing as being indifferent to attribution, now is it?) The quote, from Elia then by way of Cecil, follows:

"Let no one receive these narratives of Elia for true records. They are in truth but shadows of fact -- verisimilitudes not verities -- or sitting upon the remote edges and outskirts of history.'"

Cecil goes on to analyze the ways in which Lamb's adoption of Elia allows him to "make use of material drawn from his own experience" without being circumscribed by autobiography. Instead, speaking through this character both exactly like and distinctly unlike himself, Lamb could then, and did, alter the details his own experience; changing names, leaving out some, though by no means all of his unhappiest memories, making better some of what may have been bad, so as to make something new, something amusing and beautiful, not just from the life he'd known, ugly and otherwise, but what he'd come to know about that experience. Being not in the business of writing history, or even of recording the facts of his own autobiography, but rather of writing personal essays and making art, Lamb felt no hesitation about making from his life, something new, or changing, as Cecil says, "for the sake of artistic effect," what was true to what he felt told a larger Truth.

This also from Cecil: "Elia, then, is not the whole and unedited Charles Lamb; but he is Lamb at his most characteristic, and composed of those elements in his personality which particularly distinguish him from other people; and with these heightened and lit up by the light of his creative vision..."

So why then "Elia," and not just "Charles Lamb?"

(I should have thought this was too obvious a thing to require much more explanation, but having been lately much troubled by David Shields' new book, I suppose something more might need be said, even if only by me.)

Yes, "Elia" is a fiction, though neither more nor less a fiction than "The Spectator" of Addison & Steele, or Johnson's "Rambler." The Essays of Elia are entirely within the same tradition, though what Lamb made with this assumption of a character was more obviously personal, both in subject and in style, than did his chief models. And this is the point, in so far as I am still thinking about Shields & Co. tonight: the personal essay allows for this lie, not because Lamb had a disregard for factual accuracy or was indifferent to history. His critical journalism and his work as an anthologist of the Elizabethan dramatists show him to have been a champion of many a neglected or forgotten reputation, and always scrupulous about citation and sources, as this could only help his cause in promoting what he thought good, by directing the reader's attention to what he could only excerpt. Nor did Lamb, in Elia or elsewhere, imagine his readers to be indifferent to the distinction between fact and fiction, or incapable of judging and valuing the veracity of the one in preference to the other, an asinine and insulting suggestion that would never have occurred to Lamb, or anyone else not in the business of contemporary cultural criticism.

Let me just quote a passage from Ainger that I found very much to the same point, and even more to my purpose in writing tonight about Shields, and about Lamb, his biographers and critics. It is from Ainger's sixth chapter, covering the years of Lamb's greatest literary activity, from 1817 to 1823, and refers specifically to the style of The Essays of Elia:

"A feature of Lamb's method, as we have seen, is his use of quotations. Not only are they brought in so as really to illustrate, but the passages cited themselves receive illustration from the use made of them, and gain a permanent and heightened value from it. Whether it be a garden-scene from Marvell, a solemn paradox from Sir Thomas Brown, or a stanza from some then recent poem of Wordsworth, the quotation fulfils a double purpose, and has sent many a reader to explore for himself in the author whose words strike him with such luminous effect in their new setting."

The emphasis at the end of that is mine. Lamb did not then, even as Elia, "appropriate" the past, as Shields would seem to suggest contemporary writers not only may, but have some kind of obligation to do. Instead, he reverenced the writers he loved, and sought, even within the limitations imposed on his essays by publisher's requirements and the confinement of newspaper and magazine columns, to direct his readers, always, to what he thought best in the books that made up so much of his life, and more importantly, he sought, like Montaigne, to tell what he knew and found this might best be done by using what he'd read, and often by using only what he was convinced had been better said before him.

Any claim now being made that Montaigne, or Samuel Johnson, or Charles Lamb, of all people! or any of the great essayists, saw nothing in the books about them but the "materials" with which they might, with the impunity of the artist, make something new, without acknowledging what was not, is the most disgraceful canard. Anyone arguing otherwise is exactly what Montaigne, and Johnson, and Lamb never were, namely, dishonest. It is, at best, disingenuous to read the great English essayists in this way, or to claim them as the ancestors for the postmodernists' juvenile irreverence. Nothing could be further from the facts, or the truth.

(It is interesting to note the way in which John D'Agata, in his anthologies, and Shields in his new book, either avoid many of the greatest essayists altogether, or, as D'Agata did with Montaigne, choose to only use that which is least characteristic of their style, and their purpose. It must be hard, trying to find something in Montaigne to support the idea that an "attempt" might be made by any but honest means. When Lamb's Elia makes claim to only "verisimilitude not verities," he speaks for himself, not for the authors he quotes, and his joke is on himself, not them. That is a lesson contemporary essayists would do well to learn, when being all loose an "lyrical" with the work of their betters.)

So perhaps I do indeed need my own copy of Alfred Ainger's Lectures and Essays, however much they may cost me. Everything I've read by that gentleman has suggested he was a honest person. I would do well to have one more honest man in my library.