14.

There’s My Comfort

When I was working on William Blake in my student days, I took a copy of the Oxford Edition of his complete writings on the train to York. I was off to stay with my friend Chris in a student house filled with the fumes of pot. ‘Getting stoned is probably the only way you’ll understand The Four Zoas,’ he said. I saw what he meant when I encountered such lines as Four Universes round the Mundane Egg remain Chaotic. Mildly high, I turned to the marginalia that Blake scribbled in his copy of Spurzheim’s Observations on the Deranged Manifestations of the Mind, or Insanity:

Cowper came to me and said: ‘O that I were insane always. I will never rest. Can you not make me truly insane? I will never rest till I am so. O that in the bosom of God I was hid. You retain health and yet are as mad as any of us all – over us all – mad as a refuge from unbelief – from Bacon, Newton and Locke.’

For Blake, William Cowper, a depressive poet of extreme ‘sensibility’, stood as an intermediary between the Age of Reason, epitomized by the empirical science and philosophy of Bacon, Newton and Locke, and a new way of thinking that revelled in the counter-reality of imagination. We call it Romanticism.

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For Dickens, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. It certainly seems to have been a time when you had to be at least a little bit mad to be a poet. There wasn’t any money in poetry, as opposed to novel-writing, unless you became a celebrity like Lord Byron or Walter Scott. And you did your best work when you weren’t entirely in your right mind. Wasn’t that the problem with William Wordsworth? When he was young and in love, intoxicated by the French Revolution, or when he was wandering and homeless, depressed and alone, he created poetry of unprecedented freshness and feeling, but when he settled down to happily married life and a government sinecure as Distributor of Stamps for the County of Westmorland, his muse left him and he started writing verse of unremitting tedium, while revising The Prelude, his glorious poetic autobiography, for the worse.

At school, our first introduction to Romanticism was Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s opium dream of ‘Kubla Khan’, interrupted by the knock of a person from Porlock. In a French class, we read and translated the sonnet ‘El Desdichado’, written in a Paris mental hospital by Gérard de Nerval, who had taken to perambulating through the gardens of the Palais-Royal with his pet lobster Thibault on a blue-silk lead:

Je suis le Ténébreux …

et mon luth constellé

Porte le soleil noir de la Mélancolie.

‘I am the twilight and my star-studded lute wears the black sun of depression.’

I didn’t study German, but it was the subject of my housemaster, Ian Huish, and he introduced me to the beautiful but baffling poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, for whom love and art were the only bulwarks against depression within and a crumbling world without – the Great War, the end of Habsburg Europe, the chaos of modernity. From Ian, I learned of how the headless torso of an ancient statue of Apollo in the Louvre made Rilke think about what is broken and what endures and how that thought made him say to himself and to us, Du mußt dein Leben ändern, You must change your life. I learned, too, of his idea of the angel, which seemed like a symbol of inspiration but which I did not really understand until I found a beautiful poem called ‘Der Geist Ariel’ that Rilke wrote after reading The Tempest: Ariel was Prospero’s angel, the instrument of the magical power of art, which to be truly loved had to be renounced. It was the same with memory: because it is all that we have of those we have lost, we must cherish it but also let it go. Rilke imagines Prospero

Weeping too, perhaps,

when you remember how he loved and yet

wished to leave you: always both, at once.

Then there was another of my second-hand bookshop finds: a slender Faber paperback selection by Ted Hughes of the poems of Emily Dickinson. His Introduction spoke of the tranced suspense and deliberation in her punctuation of dashes, and the riddling, oblique artistic strategies, the Shakespearian texture of the language, solid with metaphor:

Much Madness is divinest Sense –

To a discerning Eye –

Much Sense – the starkest Madness –

’Tis the Majority

In this, as All, prevail –

Assent – and you are sane –

Demur – you’re straightway dangerous –

And handled with a Chain –

In sixth-form General Studies we had learned about the theory of the ‘anti-psychiatrist’ R. D. Laing that we all have a ‘divided self’, and that schizophrenia is not so much an illness as an extreme manifestation of this. A hundred years before this very 1960s idea, Dickinson was suggesting that madness and sanity are not so much biological facts as socially determined conventions: it is the Majority who decide on the labels ‘mad’ and ‘sane’. Was the role of the poet, I wondered, to be a discerning Eye that questions the majority opinion?

Our French teacher, David Vann, prescribed Albert Camus’ La Chute as an A-Level set text. A self-proclaimed existentialist, he took me and Chris under his wing for some extra tutorials, tracing the ideas of Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre back to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. I was particularly struck by a passage in Twilight of the Idols where Nietzsche set out to explain ‘the psychology of the artist’:

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication. Intoxication must first have heightened the excitability of the entire machine: no art results before that happens. All kinds of intoxication, however different their origin, have the power to do this: above all, the intoxication of sexual excitement, the oldest and most primitive form of intoxication.

Save for occasional forays to the pub with my friends, there was very little intoxication in my own life at this time, so I found it vicariously in the Romantic poets. While Chris wrestled with Sartre’s pour soi and en soi, I thrilled to Richard Holmes’s biography Shelley: The Pursuit. Gradually, though, I began to question the idea that great art emerges from a state of mania or drug-induced or sex-inspired intoxication. I witnessed an episode of schizophrenia at first hand – someone dear to me hearing voices coming from the wall. This was no condition in which to produce enduring insights into the way of the world. As for what we were learning to call ‘affective bipolar disorder’, I could see that the manic phase might well produce elated creativity, but didn’t the (usually far more sustained) periods of depression yield only blackness and torpor? I read about how John Clare would write poetry manically, compulsively, addictively, for a few weeks, then for months barely be able to get himself out of bed, let alone pick up his pen and compose. And in Virginia Woolf’s diary I found that when she was in phases of depression, the most she could achieve in the way of writing was the occasional book review. She could do nothing with her novels.

John Dryden, the Poet Laureate who visited Knole in the late seventeenth century, wrote a much-quoted rhyming couplet:

Great Wits are sure to Madness near allied,

And thin Partitions do their Bounds divide.

Creativity may well reside somewhere close to that thin partition, but once the boundary is crossed there is only silence or the nightmare of what Clare called his ‘blue devils’, or the terrifying cacophony of disordered voices that is experienced in schizophrenia.

The ‘special subject’ I chose for my final undergraduate year was a newly designed course called ‘Shakespeare and the Development of English Literature’. Its particular focus was his influence on the Romantic movement. This was perfect: my two literary passions yoked, not by violence, together. I immersed myself in the lectures on Shakespeare that Coleridge and William Hazlitt delivered in Regency London, fascinated to find that while the former focused on the poetic language and what he called a ‘psycho-analysis’ of the characters, the latter was more interested in the politics of the plays and the charisma of the actor Edmund Kean.

It was then that I read Charles Lamb’s essay on how Shakespeare’s tragedies are too great for the stage. It was written before Kean made his debut. Prompted by Hazlitt, Lamb changed his mind: yes, Kean had done justice to Hamlet and Macbeth, Richard III and Shylock, Othello and Iago. Not, however, to King Lear. No actor, he maintained, could truly get inside the head of Lear in the way that a reader can.

In another essay, entitled ‘Sanity of True Genius’, Lamb suggested that Shakespeare could only portray Lear’s madness so convincingly because he was supremely sane himself. The essay begins by taking issue with Dryden’s famous couplet:

So far from the position holding true, that great wit (or genius, in our modern way of speaking), has a necessary alliance with insanity, the greatest wits, on the contrary, will ever be found to be the sanest writers. It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a mad Shakespeare. The greatness of wit, by which the poetic talent is here chiefly to be understood, manifests itself in the admirable balance of all the faculties. Madness is the disproportionate straining or excess of any one of them … The ground of the mistake is, that men, finding in the raptures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their own experience, besides the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet. But the true poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject, but has dominion over it … Or if, abandoning himself to that severer chaos of a ‘human mind untuned,’ he is content awhile to be mad with Lear, or to hate mankind (a sort of madness) with Timon, neither is that madness, nor this misanthropy, so unchecked, but that, – never letting the reins of reason wholly go, while most he seems to do so, – he has his better genius still whispering at his ear, with the good servant Kent suggesting saner counsels, or with the honest steward Flavius recommending kindlier resolutions.

To enter the territory associated with mental extremity, but to resist intoxication: that is the mark of the true artist, Lamb was arguing, in sharp distinction from Nietzsche. It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a mad Shakespeare because Shakespeare is always so supremely in control of his material, so flexible in his capacity to inhabit the diverse voices of all his characters. Lamb seemed to me absolutely correct that whenever Shakespeare introduced a ‘mad’ character, he accompanied him with saner counsels: not only the wise and kind words of Kent in Lear and the good servant Flavius in Timon of Athens, but also Camillo seeking to calm Leontes’ fevered mind in The Winter’s Tale, Horatio with Hamlet, and a dozen more.

There have been attempts to conceive of a depressed, if not an actually mad, Shakespeare. The Victorian Anglo-Irish critic Edward Dowden suggested that the dramatist’s turn in the first years of the seventeenth century towards tragedy and dark tragi-comedy (Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, eventually King Lear) was bound up with some deep personal trauma. This was Shakespeare ‘in the depths’, as opposed to the Shakespeare of the serene last plays, where he was back ‘on the heights’. There is, however, no evidence for speculations of this kind: they represent a back-projection of nineteenth-century Romantic conceptions of creativity on to the Renaissance.

The intriguing thing about Lamb’s essay on the sanity of true genius was that he had experience of deep personal trauma.

On Friday afternoon the Coroner and Jury sat on the body [i.e. the case] of a Lady, in the neighbourhood of Holborn, who died in consequence of a wound from her daughter the previous day.

So began a report in the London Times on a September morning in 1796:

It appeared by the evidence adduced, that while the family were preparing for dinner, the young lady seized a case-knife laying on the table, and in a menacing manner pursued a little girl, her apprentice, round the room. On the calls of her infirm mother to forbear, she renounced her first object, and with loud shrieks approached her parent. The child, by her cries, quickly brought up the landlord of the house, but too late. The dreadful scene presented to him the mother lifeless, pierced to the heart, on a chair, her daughter yet wildly standing over her with the fatal knife, and the old man her father weeping by her side, himself bleeding at the forehead from the effect of a severe blow he received from one of the forks she had been madly hurling about the room.

The diligent court reporter went on to explain that for a few days prior to this the family had observed some symptoms of insanity in the young lady. By the Wednesday night, they were worried. Early on the Thursday morning her brother went to the well-respected family doctor. But he wasn’t at home.

It seems the young lady had been once before deranged, the report concluded, with the result that The Jury of course brought in their verdict, LUNACY. Her name was Mary Lamb.

Charles, her brother, wrote to his best friend from school, Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

Some of my friends or the public papers by this time may have informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen on our family. I will only give you the outlines. My poor dear dearest sister in a fit of insanity has been the death of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a mad house, from whence I fear she must be moved to an hospital. God has preserved to me my senses, – I eat and drink and sleep, and have my judgment I believe very sound. My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt … thank God I am very calm and composed, and able to do the best that remains to do. Write, – as religious a letter as possible – but no mention of what is gone and done with. – With me ‘the former things are passed away,’ and I have something more to do than to feel –

God almighty have us all in his keeping. –

C. Lamb.

Mention nothing of poetry. I have destroyed every vestige of past vanities of that kind. Do as you please, but if you publish, publish mine (I give free leave) without name or initial, and never send me a book, I charge you.

The two friends had been planning to publish a joint collection of poetry. Lamb, though claiming to be very calm and composed, was clearly in a state of extreme shock. His first reaction to the trauma of what he had witnessed was to renounce poetry altogether. He dismisses as a ‘vanity’ the expression of emotion that was, in his view and Coleridge’s, the purpose of poetry. I have something more to do than to feel: his task now, he says, is only to care for his wounded father and his aunt and to pray for his sister. Religious faith will be his only comfort; poetry, at least in the immediate aftermath of crisis, was of no use to him.

Was it any wonder, then, that Lamb believed in the sanity of true genius? For him, madness meant the psychotic behaviour manifested in his sister’s violent act. It did not mean the divine fury of writing poetry.

Under the surprisingly liberal mental-health regime of the age, after a short period of confinement in the Islington madhouse, Mary Lamb was released back into the community on the condition that her brother served as surety for her good behaviour. A poet and dreamer by nature, Charles reined himself in to a prosaic life in the service of his sister, maintaining a tedious but secure post as a clerk in the offices of the East India Company and banishing all thought of marriage or of giving up the day job for the risk of a full-time writing career. He survived with the help of his sense of humour (he was an obsessive punster), his circle of friends such as Coleridge, and daily doses of wine and brandy.

There were times when Mary had further manic episodes and was returned to the asylum. There were times when Charles sank into depression and he too was temporarily consigned to the madhouse. But they endured, and one of their tools of endurance was writing. Charles gradually returned to literature. He became one of the leading essayists of the age and Mary one of the leading children’s authors. Their most successful work was one on which they collaborated, though only the name of Charles appeared on the title page. Tales from Shakespear designed for the use of Young Persons became, for more than a hundred years, the standard work that introduced children to the plays. Mary turned the comedies into prose narratives, Charles the tragedies.

The book was designed, according to its Preface, to teach courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity. To spare the blushes of parents reading the stories to their children, it glossed over many more adult details in the plays. So, for example, in The Winter’s Tale Mary omitted the fact that the seed of Leontes’ jealousy is his belief that Hermione and Polixenes are having sex. Even when Paulina brings on the baby, the text does not explain that Leontes banishes the child because he believes that her father is Polixenes.

Of all Mary’s stories, the most effective is her version of Twelfth Night. A play about the bond of brother and sister, it pierced to the heart of the Lambs. Mary’s narrative version runs directly from the parting of Viola and Sebastian to Olivia’s mourning for her dead brother. Viola, who was herself in such a sad affliction for her brother’s loss, wished she could live with this lady, who so tenderly mourned a brother’s death. Mary thus highlights the parallel between the two women who have each lost a brother. Then the sea captain explains that the grieving Olivia will not admit anyone into her household, leading Viola to go instead to serve Duke Orsino in disguise. In Mary’s telling, the bond between sister and brother matters more than the marriage plot: wedded on the same day, the storm and shipwreck, which had separated them, being the means of bringing to pass their high and mighty fortunes.

Sister and brother, Mary and Charles are Viola and Sebastian through the looking glass, reading and talking Shakespeare, writing together in order to assuage their trauma. In a letter, Mary conjured up their love, manifested in their collaboration:

You would like to see us, as we often sit writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting), like Hermia and Helena in the Midsummer Night’s Dream; or, rather, like an old literary Darby and Joan: I taking snuff, and he groaning all the while and saying he can make nothing of it, which he always says till he has finished.

Shakespeare, words, bonds, writing: their comfort.

Many of the other graduate students in the English Department were unhappy during the year I was at Harvard. They thought the place was old-fashioned and wished they had gone to Yale, which was the epicentre of a new phenomenon called Deconstruction. The ‘Yale Mafia’ – five high-profile professors – had just published a manifesto, which they said wasn’t a manifesto, called Deconstruction and Criticism. It included a head-spinning essay by their French Visiting Professor Jacques Derrida – an essay with a single footnote that spidered its way through a hundred pages. Derrida was the father of Deconstruction. His proposition was that since all texts are made of language and all interpretations are made of language, there is nothing outside the text. Meaning is always indeterminate, always deferred, and in every text there is self-contradiction that sends the interpreter into an abyss of uncertainty. Literary theory was becoming very superior, as clever critics began to chide hapless creators for falling into the heffalump trap of lucidity or letting slip politically incorrect sentiments.

Then there was an essay by Harold Bloom that began with the claim that the word ‘meaning’ is closely related to the word ‘moaning’ and that all poetry is therefore a form of moaning in which the poet wrestles with the Oedipal influence of a poetic father, because ‘the truest sources’ of inspiration are to be found ‘in the powers of poems already written, or rather, already read’. All truly original writing, Bloom had argued a few years earlier in his one-man manifesto The Anxiety of Influence, is a form of ‘strong misreading’. And he set out to prove his case by looking at the way in which the Romantic poets had been inhibited by the epic achievement of their alleged ‘father’, John Milton. ‘I have given up Hyperion’, wrote John Keats of his own attempt at an epic, because ‘there were too many Miltonic inversions in it … Life to him would be death to me.’

This was all very original, and at least Bloom’s prose was less impenetrable than that of his colleagues, but it didn’t seem to me quite right. In my undergraduate course on the Romantics as readers of Shakespeare, I had discovered that they failed disastrously when they tried writing plays in his style, but they didn’t seem especially anxious about this. They knew they could never be as good as Shakespeare, but they didn’t regard him as an oppressive influence. On the contrary, they rejoiced in his genius and treated him as a talisman. Keats’s own intensity of thought and expression visibly strengthened with the study of his idol, according to his close friend Charles Cowden Clarke.

When Keats was feeling lonely and unwell in rented accommodation on the Isle of Wight, he was delighted to find an engraved portrait of Shakespeare in the hallway. His landlady kindly let him take it away when he left. You can just make it out on the wall of his Hampstead home in his friend Joseph Severn’s portrait of the poet reading, with the door to the garden ajar, as if to let in the song of the nightingale. I am sure that he is imagined to be reading Shakespeare.

One of Keats’s close friends was the manic-depressive painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, who eventually committed suicide, ending his diary with the lines from King Lear about being stretched no longer on the rack of this tough world (‘longer’ – such a brilliant, painful pun). It was to Haydon that Keats wrote from the Isle of Wight:

I remember your saying that you had notions of a good Genius presiding over you. I have of late had the same thought, for things which I do half at Random are afterwards confirmed by my judgment in a dozen features of Propriety. Is it too daring to fancy Shakspeare this Presider?

Bloom may have been right that Milton was the great Inhibitor for the Romantics. But Shakespeare was the benign Presider. Keats went on to hope that the landlady giving him the portrait of Shakespeare was a good omen. Then he dipped into gloom: I am glad you say every man of great views is at times tormented as I am. But Shakespeare was his solace in such times of torment. A little earlier, he had written to his brothers: I felt rather lonely this Morning at breakfast so I went and unbox’d a Shakspeare – ‘there’s my Comfort’. The quotation is from Caliban in The Tempest; that character’s comfort was alcohol, whereas for Keats it was Shakespeare.

One day I went into the Houghton Library at Harvard and unboxed the very Shakespeare to which Keats was referring. His own copy of a multi-volume pocket edition, printed in Chiswick in 1814. I traced my hand over his underlinings and marginal annotations. I especially liked the last page of the text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Fie, he had written, as he inked out Dr Johnson’s lukewarm comment on the play. And, echoing and inverting the closing line of Theseus’ speech on the lunatic, the lover and the poet, Such tricks hath weak imagination. At that moment, I saw what the theme of my doctoral dissertation should be: a riposte to Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’, with the working title ‘Strong Imagination: The Consolation of Influence in Romantic Shakespeare’.

Back in England the following year, I went on a wintry day to Keats’s house in Hampstead. I put on the white gloves provided by the curator and opened Keats’s other copy of Shakespeare. Harvard had the boxed edition, but this was a greater prize: John Keats’s facsimile of the First Folio itself. There was a blank half-page at the end of Hamlet, opposite the beginning of King Lear. He had filled it with a poem called ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’. I understood the idea of a compulsion to re-read Shakespeare’s darkest play. For Keats, life was indeed, as he wrote in the poem, a fierce dispute betwixt Damnation and impassion’d clay. Bitter-sweet as the Shakspearean fruit of Lear’s descent into madness inevitably was, the experience of re-reading the play gave him comfort. It turned the embers of his own sorrows to new fire, new creativity, new hope:

Give me new Phoenix Wings to fly at my desire.

For some of the Romantics, though, there was no comfort. ‘I am glad you can amuse yourself by writing,’ said a well-meaning visitor to the poet who had been in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum for nearly twenty years. John Clare replied,

I can’t do it – they pick my brains out. Why, they have cut off my head and picked out all the letters in the alphabet – all the vowels and consonants and brought them out through my ears; and they want me to write poetry! I can’t do it … I liked hard work best, I was happy then. Literature has destroyed my head and brought me here.

When I began researching the life of Clare, I took for granted the view of the poet’s first biographer that one of the villains in his story was his doctor, Fenwick Skrimshire, who allegedly committed him to the asylum on the grounds that he had been driven mad by, as the asylum admission papers put it, years addicted to poetical prosing. According to that first biographer, Frederick Martin, writing in the immediate aftermath of the poet’s death in the asylum at the age of seventy, Clare was incarcerated for the mere fact of being a poet.

But I discovered that, far from being the country ignoramus supposed by Martin, Skrimshire was an educated and cultivated doctor with particular expertise in the area of mental illness. The remark about Clare’s addiction to poetry was not the grounds for admission to the asylum, but the answer to a question on the admission papers that was intended to provide assistance in diagnosis and treatment: has the insanity been ‘preceded by any severe or long continued mental emotion or exertion’? Skrimshire had been treating his patient for two decades: he knew that the addictive writing of poetry was indeed a long-continued mental emotion and exertion for Clare. Maybe literature really was what destroyed his head and drove him to the asylum.

When I gave talks about my biography of Clare at literary festivals, the question was sometimes asked: ‘How would he have been treated if he were alive today?’ My answer was that he would be diagnosed with bipolar disorder (‘manic depression’) and treated with Prozac or Lithium to even out his highs and lows. But if his creativity was intimately bound to his cyclical journey, if the writing was the fruit of his ‘up’ or ‘manic’ times, then would the administration of a drug such as Lithium have killed his muse? Would he have achieved stability in his everyday life at the cost of his poetry? As human beings, we would not wish for poets – for a John Clare, an Emily Dickinson, a Robert Lowell – to suffer mentally, but as lovers of literature we would not wish to be without the poems that enable us better to enjoy life and better to endure it. Is the true role of poets to be, as William Empson suggested of King Lear, scapegoats who take upon themselves the mental fight of their readers?

John Keats writes out his sonnet as he sits down to re-read King Lear

Public domain image from the author’s collection