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.