A. C. SWINBURNE. A poet's life. By Rikky Rooksby. 322 pp. Aldershot: Scolar.
Pounds 29.95 - 1 85928 069 2.
The libidinous legends and melancholy reality of Swinburne's life.
He was "hardly a normal person" (Turgenev), "not quite a human
being" (Edmund Gosse), "virtually supernatural" (Guy de
Maupassant), or "a very spoilt child" (many an unimpressed dinner
guest). Those who met Algernon Charles Swinburne did not compare him to
other men. The oddness of his appearance, which so endeared him to the
cartoonists, was part of it: his agitated little body was hardly broader
than his big, beaky head, an effect accentuated by a lavish outgrowth of
curly red hair. Gosse's first impression of "some orange-crested bird"
is elaborated in Henry Adams's well-known conceit of a tropical bird,
high-crested, long-beaked, quick-moving, with rapid utterances and screams
of humor, quite unlike any English lark or nightingale. One could hardly
call him a crimson macaw among owls, and yet no ordinary contrast availed.
But Swinburne was more than physically freakish. Meeting him when both were in
their mid-twenties, Adams also found him "astonishingly gifted, and
convulsively droll", with "a wonderful sense of farce" that
was to Adams more marvellous than the strange new ballads he recited. That
sense of farce is amply indulged in Swinburne's brilliant letters (edited in
two volumes by Cecil Y. Lang, 1959); on the other hand, it is detectable
nowhere, beyond the set-piece parodies of his "Heptalogia", in the
2,000 pages of his published verse. The discrepancy makes him seem, as well
as the most exotic, the most perverse of the principal writers of the
Victorian age.
Rikky Rooksby's new biography is the first to propose a clinical cause for
Swinburne's singular appearance, and perhaps also for some of the
eccentricities of his behaviour. Throughout his life he suffered from
tremors and fits, attributed by his family doctor to "an excess of
electric vitality".
These are consistent, in the recent opinion of an American physician, with
minor brain damage, or arrested hydrocephaly, sustained at birth. When
Swinburne came into his privileged place in the world – on the Isle of
Wight, in 1837, the first child of a marriage between two ancient, inbred
families – he was, in his own words, "all but dead, and certainly
not expected to live an hour". But he survived to wear what Rooksby
tells us was "the largest hat in Eton", where he wrote
precociously and by his personal charm earned the baffled respect of his
thicker peers. His immaturity only seems to have begun at Oxford; "dear
little Carrots" was taken up by the Pre-Raphaelites like a mascot, and
he left without taking a degree.
Swinburne never married. But he did not, as a young man, believe himself
doomed to a solitary life; and the poems and letters allude quietly to a
lost love.
This, as Cecil Lang first revealed in the 1950s, was Swinburne's cousin Mary
Gordon, with whom he had ridden and played as a teenager. Mary later
insisted that the relationship had always been brother-and-sisterly, as if
it were ludicrous to surmise otherwise - with some-one so like a little boy
or bird.
Perhaps he only became aware of the depth of his own feelings when, in 1864,
she announced her engagement to Robert Disney Leith, a giant one-armed hero
of the Indian wars, a man twenty years his senior and effectively of another
species. In the semi-autobiographical novel Lesbia Brandon, Herbert Seyton
has his suit refused: "he sat and felt a breakage inside him of all
that made up the hopefullest part of his life". That winter, aged
twenty-seven, Swinburne wrote "The Triumph of Time":
Before our lives divide for ever, . . .
I will say no word that a man might say
Whose whole life's love goes down in a day;
For this could never have been; and never,
Though the gods and the years relent, shall be.
- a poem which grew sadder and stronger as the years fulfilled its rhetoric.
In the meantime, the little virgin's name became a byword for sexual
licence.
Poems and Ballads (1866) was a literary sensation and a public scandal.
Progressive readers were spellbound by its new rhythms and melodies. (At one
recitation of the poems, John Ruskin cried out, "How beautiful! How
divinely beautiful!") But pieces such as "Anactoria"
(featuring sadistic lesbianism), "The Leper" (necrophilia) and "Dolores"
(addressed to "Our Lady of Pain") excited the reprobation of
England's chaster critics. The publisher withdrew the book. Before long,
authorship was confused with practice, and tales about England's "libidinous
laureate" spread abroad. "Absolutely anything", marvelled
Turgenev, "could be expected of Swinburne"; including, one rumour
had it, eating the monkey that had been his mistress. Rooksby declines to
repeat these stories, as if they had been invented to discredit his man. In
fact, Swinburne revelled in his unearned reputation: "I have a
character to keep up", he wrote to the man of the world Richard Burton, "
- at least in my writings." Oscar Wilde saw through the publicity that
Swinburne was "a braggart in matters of vice, who had done everything
he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and
bestiality, without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a
bestializer".
A taste for flagellation had been swished into him at Eton; and a number of
grown-up letters (to a surprising number and variety of correspondents,
including women) get adolescently worked up on the subject. In 1866, he
began visiting "Verbena Lodge", a high-class flogging
establishment in St John's Wood. Dismayed at this development, D. G.
Rossetti hoped to cure the habit by introducing his friend to some woman who
might "make a man of him". Rossetti's choice, the
five-times-married American circus performer, Adah Mencken, took to
Swinburne, but had to report back that "she hadn't been able to get him
up to the scratch, and couldn't make him understand that biting's no use".
The experiment seems not to have been repeated, and the "copulatory"
passages of Swinburne's poems remained curiously indistinct: "and all
his heart / filled hers . . . ."
It was drink, rather, that became his defining vice. He was introduced to
brandy in 1862 by Richard Burton - who after their sessions would tuck the
unconscious Swinburne under one arm and carry him out to a cab. The 1860s
furnish innumerable accounts of Swinburne's disgraceful behaviour, snatching
at bottles "like a mongoose", "belching out blasphemy and
bawdry and prostrated by drink"; in the 1870s, as his health gave way,
his letters are full of "prostration", "influenza" and "seediness",
but he was incapable of admitting the cause, blaming one bout of sickness
outrageously on the "perfume of Indian lilies in a close bedroom".
As he made himself impossible to live with, so he had to live on his own,
which increased his vulnerability and deepened his melancholy.
In a letter of 1875, Swinburne congratulates his friend Edmund Gosse on his
marriage; though the happy event must bring to his own mind "the
reverse experience which left my young manhood 'a barren stock' - if I may
cite that phrase without seeming to liken myself to a male queen Elizabeth".
Swinburne's pheno-menal energies were at last subdued by his alcoholism, and
Gosse's tender account of the poet's subsequent visits to his home and baby
includes the most plainly human image we have of him: . . . he was waiting
for me when I came back from the office. The maid had seen him into the
study, brightened the fire and raised the lamp, but . . . I found him
mournfully wandering, like a lost thing, on the staircase . . . . When he
and I were alone, he closed up to the fire, his great head bowed, his knees
held tight together, and his finger-tips pressed to his chest, in what I
call his "penitential" attitude, and he began a long tale,
plaintive and rather vague, about his loneliness, the sadness of his life,
the suffering he experiences from the slanders of others . . . . (He) said
that a little while ago he found his intellectual energy succumbing under a
morbid distress at his isolation, and that he had been obliged steadily to
review before his conscience his imaginative life in order to prevent
himself from sinking into despair. This is only a mood, to be sure; but if
there be any people who think so ill of him, I only wish they could see him
at these recuperative intervals. Whatever he may be elsewhere, in our
household not a kinder, simpler, or more affectionate creature could be
desired as a visitor.
By the summer of 1879, these "recuperative intervals" were too rare
to save him, and his family and most of his friends had privately given him
up. As an emergency measure, he was taken by Theodore Watts, a kindly lawyer
with literary aspirations, to stay for a few days with him and his sister in
Putney (then a village suburb); the arrangement was to last thirty years,
until the poet's death at seventy-two.
It was once usual to make fun of the motherly Watts, even to be suspicious of
him: Rooksby, leaving open every option for loyalty to Swinburne, hints
darkly, "I think it possible that further research may yet uncover some
ugly tales of life at The Pines." But Watts's intervention and his
subsequent dedication certainly saved the poet's life. According to Coulson
Kernahan in Swinburne As I Knew Him (1919), he managed to wean the poet off
strong drink in stages over a period of a few months: from brandy to port,
because port was Tennyson's drink; from port to burgundy, the drink of the
Three Musketeers; from burgundy to claret, "the proper drink for
gentlemen"; and finally to "Shakespeare's brown October, our own
glorious and incompar-able beer", which was all the poet took in the
regime to which he now consented. He would leave the house at eleven each
morning to walk across Wimbledon Common, pausing to admire babies in their
prams along the way, dropping into the Rose and Crown, and returning for
lunch (and his single bottle of Bass) at one-thirty. He would read aloud
before dinner, usually from Dickens, and afterwards work late into the
night. As he grew increasingly deaf, he saw few visitors.
This was the sort of cosy pattern that Swinburne could never have devised for
himself, and his biography peters out in it. Rooksby can spin no more than
fifty pages out of the last thirty years, despite his determination to
disprove the notion that the poet in Swinburne "died" when he
moved to Putney. (Having things both ways, though, he believes that
Swinburne would enjoy major-poet status today if someone had shot him when
he was thirty-two, before, that is, he could obscure his better poems with
so many worse.) In fact, it is not clear that his dwindling band of readers
separate the old and the young Swinburne in their heads, or the good and the
bad, as they do with Wordsworth or Browning.
Though their quality may vary, the poems seem imaginatively of a piece,
resembling one another through a common lack. The critic Edmund Wilson
commented that Swinburne "can never surprise or delight by a colloquial
turn of phrase, a sharply observed detail, a magical touch of colour".
But Swinburne's art is founded precisely on the banishment of these tricks, "such
beauties", as he called them, "as strike you and startle and go
out . . . sharp-edged prettinesses, shining surprises and striking accidents
that are anything but casual . . . intrusive and singular and exceptional
beauties which break up and distract the simple charm of general and single
beauty, the large and musical unity of things".
A letter about what he considered his masterwork, the Wagnerian narrative
Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), shows this self-censorship in action. Quoting
one sequence, "And the sweet shining signs of women's names . . . /
Flame from Queen Helen to Queen Guenevere", the letter continues, "(I
instantly added in my own mind" - as if the more solemn verse were the
product of someone else's - "this couplet - While toothless mouths of
cuckolds in the dark / Grin from King Menelaus to King Mark)." This
Byronic devilry has no place in Swinburne's project of monotony, the
creation of featureless verbal landscapes or seascapes that read as if they
could go on for ever:
Miles, and miles, and miles of desolation!
Leagues on leagues on leagues without a change!
("By the North Sea") Swinburne's poems return again and again to the
North Sea's "fruitless floating fields of wan green water", in
which, as a boy, he had bathed off the Northumbrian coast. Nearly 1,000
single lines, and over thirty poems, end with "the sea". It is the
last word of his Tristram, as, after 150 pages of couplets as rolling and
repetitive as the waves, the verse rouses itself to bring the lovers to the
same submarine entombment he once imagined he might share with Mary Gordon:
And the king
Built for their tomb a chapel bright like spring
With flower-soft wealth of branching tracery made . . . .
There slept they wedded under moon and sun
And change of stars: and through the casements came
Midnight and noon girt round with shadowy flame
To illume their grave or veil it: till at last
On these things too was doom as darkness cast:
For the strong sea hath swallowed wall and tower,
And where their limbs were laid in woful hour
For many a fathom gleams and moves and moans
The tide that sweeps above their coffined bones
In the wrecked chancel by the shivered shrine:
Nor where they sleep shall moon or sunlight shine
Nor man look down for ever: none shall say,
Here once, or here, Tristram and Iseult lay:
But peace they have that none may gain who live,
And rest about them that no love can give,
And over them, while death and life shall be,
The light and sound and darkness of the sea.
Harold Nicolson prefaced his own brief study of Swinburne (1926) with
gratitude that the poet had been fortunate in his biographers: "for it
would indeed have been regrettable if the life-story of one who, although
surpassingly strange, was yet so exquisite a gentleman, had been marred from
the outset by any ungentle hand-ling". Rikky Rooksby's biography – the
eighth, by his calculation, but the first for two decades – represents the
return of kid gloves. He has set himself against "those who wish to
substitute ridicule for intelligent appraisal", even though his subject
is revealed as one of the richest and most tireless ridiculers in the
business. Rooksby's criticism is not adventurous, and he overrates
Swinburne's social and political influence ("His very name became a
watchword against oppression and humbug"). A. C. Swinburne: A poet's
life has been rather meanly produced, and is poorly edited.
It may therefore not be a biography on the scale or of the quality that
Rooksby thinks Swinburne deserves. But it is generous, even loving, in
spirit. And if the poems appeal only faintly now, as if from underwater, the
strange shapes of the life have their own claim on our imagination.
* Mick Imlah's poems are featured in Penguin Modern Poets 3, 1995
