Swinburne dries out - the most horrible and loathsome book ever to be got into type and other edifying subjects

Let’s check in with Algernon Swinburne, the fourth of six volumes of his Letters (1960, ed. Cecil Lang), covering 1877 through 1882.  I have run into a selfish problem.  With two volumes of letters to go, I fear that the bulk of the best ones might be behind me.

Swinburne begins the book as an out of control alcoholic, constantly ill, on the verge of death either from internal complaints or a drunken accident.  His friends and mother conspire against him to move him into the house of his lawyer, agent, nurse, and number one fan Theodore Watts, in order to not just dry Swinburne out but to keep him away from bottles.  A seven month gap in the letters is the only indication of the difficulty of the task of keeping Swinburne alive.  His friends succeed, and Swinburne lives, and writes, for another thirty years.

Afterwards, though, Swinburne is not quite as interesting in his letters.  But he is a lot more interesting than if he were dead.

Some highlights:

Swinburne’s repeated attacks on “that brute beast” Zola’s L’assommoir, a “damnable dunghill of a book” (letter 866, June 8, 1877), “the most horrible and loathsome book ever to be got into type” (942, July 11, 1879).  He singles out not the novel’s alcoholism, which would be too ironic, but the child abuse and filth.  Later (1020, July 3, 1880), Swinburne declares Humphrey Clinker “all but utterly unreadable to me” because of its scatology, at which point I find myself baffled by Swinburne’s Victorian fastidiousness.  All of this from the great champion of Sade’s Justine! “[D]e Sade at his foulest was to Zola at his purest ‘as moonlight unto sunlight and as water unto wine’ in the faculty of horrifying and nauseating the human stomach and the human soul” (942).  Some of this must be class, the aristocrat clubbing the bourgeois upstart with a Marquis.

Celebrity sightings, several before the fact, such as a letter from an 1882 letter by a young Oscar Wilde on behalf of an old Walt Whitman.  Wilde, at this point, had published a single book of poems and was touring America as a celebrity aesthete.  Writes Swinburne, “I thought he seemed a harmless young nobody, and had no notion he was the sort of man to play the mountebank as he seems to have been doing” (1132, Aug. 4, 1882).

And here is John Davidson, at this point a pale aesthete in training, a decade from writing good poetry, declaring Swinburne “the greatest poet since Shakespere” (912, March 28, 1878).  Impressive how Davidson was eventually able to purge all trace of this early worship from his poems.

Speaking of Shakespeare, Swinburne gets into a pointless feud with Robert Browning, the figurehead president of the New Shakespeare Society, over an insult from another member of that organization.  More snobbery: “no person who remains in any way or in any degree associated with the writer of that pamphlet is fit to hold any intercourse or keep up any acquaintance with me” (1065, Feb. 20, 1881).  Good riddance, Browning must have thought, sitting on his balcony in Florence.

Near the end of the book, Swinburne finally meets his hero Victor Hugo.  The episode is a triumph – a triumph of staying alive.  The breathless letter describing the encounter (1193, Nov. 26, 1882) is, charmingly, to his mother.

His white hair is as thick as his dark eyebrows, and his eyes are as bright and clear as a little child’s.  After dinner, he drank my health with a little speech, of which – tho’ I sat just opposite him – my accursed deafness prevented my hearing a single word.

During these years, Swinburne wrote numerous articles for the Encyclopedia Britannica, a verse play, and enough poetry for an astonishing four books – three published in 1880 alone.  There are two great poems in that mass, two I know of.  Tomorrow for those.

Facet, angle, colour, beauty, form - John Davidson, minor poet

John Davidson must be the most material Victorian poet.  One element is ideological.  Davidson was an atheist, sometimes an angry atheist, and atheism at this time meant a commitment to Darwin and science.  See the long poem “A Ballad in Blank Verse of the Making of a Poet” in the 1894 Ballads and Songs, in which the poet’s religious parents are wrong, but the smug young poet is cruel, with the overall tone being ironic rather than self-pitying.

That title, though, is more what I mean by “material,” that even a poem is a thing in itself.  Davidson was a great observer.

from Two Dogs

Two dogs on Bornemouth beach: a mongrel, one;
With spaniel plainest on the palimpsest,
The blur of muddled stock; the other, bred,
With tapering muzzle, rising brow, strong jaw –
A terrier to the tail’s expressive tip,
Magnetic, nimble, endlessly alert.  (ll. 1-6, 1908)

And for 108 more lines, the poet plays fetch with the dogs – “I seized the prize.  A vanquished yelp / From both; and then intensest vigilance” – with a gesture towards wisdom only in the last few lines.  Mostly, a man plays with dogs on the beach.

Davidson, in this mode, often sounds like our contemporary:

from Thames Embankment

As gray and dank as dust and ashes slaked
With wash of urban tides the morning lowered;
But over Chelsea Bridge the sagging sky
Had colour in it – blots of faintest bronze,
The stains of daybreak...
At lowest ebb the tide on either bank
Laid bare the fat mud of the Thames, all pinched
And scalloped thick with dwarfish surges…  (ll. 1-5, 9-11, 1908)

I should keep going – the next word is “cranes,” a permanent feature of today’s London skyline.  I felt like I had leapt forward not fifteen years but a hundred from “Thirty Bob a Week.”  Poems that look and sound very much like this are published now in Poetry and The Hudson Review.

The poems are good prose.  In the Selected Poems and Prose book, the strangest footnote recurs: “Based on a prose article.”  “Two Dogs” is based on ’A Railway Journey’, Glasgow Herald, 1907.  I have never before come across such a thing, such a poet.  Poem after poem, “based on a prose article.”

“Based on a prose article, ‘Urban Snow’”:

Snow

‘Who affirms that crystals are alive?’
    I affirm it, let who will deny: –
Crystals are engendered, wax and thrive,
    Wane and wither: I have seen them die.

Trust me, masters, crystals have their day
    Eager to attain the perfect norm,
Lit with purpose, potent to display
    Facet, angle, colour, beauty, form.  (1907)

I suspect this poem might also be about poetry.

Davidson’s nature poems are outstanding.  See “In Romney Marsh” (1894), full of brilliant conceits, like

The darkly shining salt sea drops
    Streamed as the waves clashed on the shore;
The beach, with all its organ stops
    Pealing again, prolonged the roar.  (ll. 25-8)

He is a fine satirist.  See “The Crystal Palace” (1905), in which he and Max Beerbohm, wander around that “portentous toy,” mocking the crowd, the building, the statue of Voltaire, the restaurant, and the Reading-room:

Three people in the silent Reading-room
Regard us darkly as we enter: three
Come in with us, stare vacantly about,
Look from the window and withdraw at once.  (ll.  293-6)

Although I read this and think “the Crystal Palace had a Reading-room, how civilized.”  Davidson’s satire has been defeated by the passage of time.  They thought they were decadents!

I want to include, before moving on from Davidson, a bit of an 1891 letter describing Davidson’s pals at the Rhymers Club: Wilde, Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, everyone, and “W. B. Yeats the wild Irishman, who lives on water-cress and pemmican and gets drunk on the smell of whisky, and can distinguish and separate out as subtly as death each individual cell in any literary organism” (175).

Minor poet, pshaw.

I hope, like you - the pre-Shakespearian minor poet John Davidson

Now I am reading Ernest Dowson, who would be a logical choice to follow Lionel Johnson – aesthete, Paterian Francophile, died young – but Dowson is still in progress and by chance I read a contemporary who followed a different path, the Scottish poet John Davidson, a Fleet Street hack who somehow developed a fresh style that was less interested in beauty, less pre-Raphaelite, less French.  He called it “pre-Shakespearian,” which was in part a joke and in part a declaration that poetry should be socially reformist:

But the woman in unwomanly rags, and all the insanity and iniquity of which she is the type, will now be sung.  Poetry will concern itself with her and hers for some time to come.  The offal of the world is being said in statistics, in prose fiction: it is besides going to be sung.  James Thomson sang it; and others are doing so…  Poor-laws, charity organisations, dexterously hold the wound open, or tenderly and hopelessly skin over the cancer…  Poetry has other functions, other aims; but this also has become its province.  (1899, pp. 157-8*)

Two notes.  First, James Thomson is better known as Bysshe Vanolis, author of the great The City of Dreadful Night (1874).  I wrote five posts on that poem in 2010.  I should have written ten.  Second, this quotation gives the wrong idea entirely of the poetry Davidson actually wrote, with one major exception, “Thirty Bob a Week,” a white-collar response to Thomas Hood’s 1843 “Song of the Shirt” about the sufferings of the thousands of clerks scraping by in London:

I couldn’t touch a stop and turn a screw,
    And set the blooming world a-work for me,
Like such as cut their teeth – I hope, like you –
    On the handle of a skeleton gold key;
I cut mine on a leek, which I eat it every week:
    I’m a clerk at thirty bob as you can see.  (1894, ll. 1-6)

Kipling worked a similar vein in his Barrack-Room Ballads (1892).  No idea if Davidson had read it, but both writers are working on similar aesthetic problems.

For like a mole I journey in the dark,
    A-travelling along the underground
From my Pillar’d Halls and broad Suburbean Park,
    To come the daily dull official round;
And home again at night with my pipe all alight,
    A-scheming how to count ten bob a pound.  (ll.  13-18)

The poem has fourteen more stanzas in this mode, denouncing the Church, his bosses, and his own foolish decision to marry young (although fortunately his wife is tough, “she’s made of flint and roses, very odd”).  The poem ends with a howl of despair.  The letters included in the edition I read suggest that there may be some autobiography here, that the clerk may have some resemblance to the hack writer:

It’s a naked child against a hungry wolf;
    It’s playing bowls upon a splitting wreck;
It’s walking on a string across a gulf
    With millstones fore-and-aft about your neck:
But the thing is daily done by many and many a one;
    And we fall, face forward, fighting, on the deck.  (ll. 91-6)

As I said above, though, as good as “Thirty Bob a Week” is, it gives the wrong idea about Davidson.  This and another poem from the same year, “The Ballad of a Nun,” made Davidson’s reputation, for whatever good that did him.  The nun poem is, in Victorian terms, daringly sexual, which is one way to sell poems, but is even less characteristic.

So, one more post on Davidson.

*  Page numbers refer to Selected Poems and Prose, ed. John Sloan (Clarendon Press, 1995).  I also read this scanned copy of the 1894 Ballads and Songs, which includes “Thirty Bob a Week” and the shocking nun ballad.