Introducing Algernon Charles Swinburne

Introducing him to myself, I mean.  I believe that he was, until a couple of months ago, the only major Victorian poet I did not read in college, even in scraps, just a few famous poems, which was all I read of John Clare and Matthew Arnold and Christina Rossetti and many others, and is still all I have read of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who I think is now the last big name I have not worked on.  Unless Robert Bridges and Ernest Dowson count as major poets and big names.

Perhaps Swinburne is no longer a major poet.  Regardless, he does not offer easy entry.  Many of his best-known poems are long, allusive, a real challenge to concentration.  The editors of the 2004 Algernon Charles Swinburne: Major Poems and Selected Prose (Yale UP) say:

Negotiating a poem by Swinburne requires a state of attention that can scarcely be maintained and that is, in any case, never sufficient.  (xxiv)

Which is hilarious, and, at least as far as maintaining my attention goes, less true for me know than it was twenty-five years ago.  If I do not understand Swinburne, I can at least read him.

The funny thing is that  without reading him I picked up a lot of facts and fun about Swinburne, whether through literary history or magazine book reviews or W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn:

He was small of stature, and at every point in his development he had remained far behind a normal size; he was quite startlingly fine-limbed; yet even as a boy he had an extraordinarily large, indeed outsize, head on his shoulders, which sloped weakly away from his neck.  (162)

This is directly below the a tiny black and white reproduction of the portrait of Swinburne by his friend William Bell Scott.  Perhaps I thought I knew Swinburne just because of this amazing image.  His head really was that big; he really did love the seashore more than any poet I know aside from Whitman.

The portrait is easily that of the man Henry Adams describes meeting in The Education of Henry Adams, the effervescent, endlessly learned talker.  “The idea that one has actually met a real genius dawns slowly on a Boston mind, but it made entry at last.”

My trusty, worn Fifth Edition Norton Anthology of English Literature  gives Swinburne nineteen pages of poems.  Seventeen pages come from 1865 to 1868, age 28 to 31, mostly from the 1866 Poems and Ballads, the book that made Swinburne’s name for the usual mix of good and bad reasons – high-quality writing, charges of obscenity.

This is also the period in which Swinburne was developing his alcoholism, along with his poetry, to a point of perfection.  Friends eventually dried him out and tamed him.

I have been reading Swinburne’s letters along with the early poems, the first of the six volume edition Cecil Lang put together in the 1960s.  The publication of the letters inspired an outstanding “life and works” piece by Edmund Wilson for the New Yorker (also available in The Novels of A. C. Swinburne (1962), where I read it).  Swinburne, as compressed by Wilson:

Here is a life lived entirely for literature, in which nothing else is really important – and since literature is inexhaustible, a life that is immensely enjoyed.

Reason enough to read Swinburne to the extent my attention can handle him, and even to spend a few days writing about his poems.

Virginia Woolf and Edmund Wilson - to summarize, or not?

Although I doubt it is visible, I write with models in mind, critics who read well, think well, and, most importantly, write well.  All errors in fact, style, opinion, and grammar are, unfortunately, mine, but I try.  Joseph Epstein, Guy Davenport, Virginia Woolf, William Pritchard, Ruth Franklin, Edmund Wilson, Christopher Benfey, Ingrid Rowland, James Wood (your list is presumably different - please, share).  I’m thinking about their work as magazine writers, although most of them have done other kinds of writing, too.  Reviews of novels or biographies, career surveys, topics of interest to readers.  “How Should One Read a Book?”  “The Pleasures of Reading.”

Virginia Woolf, in “The Novels of George Meredith” (1928) – I’m looking at The Second Common Reader (1932) – surveys, in a fundamentally Appreciationist style, the decaying reputation of the once-eminent novelist.  “This brilliant and uneasy figure has his place with the great eccentrics rather than the great masters,” but should you, common reader, read him?  Of course, of course.

The piece begins with a bit of life-and-fame, ends with a summary judgment, and in between visits three of Meredith’s many novels, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, Henry Richmond, and The Egoist.  I have read the last one, hope to read the first, and have doubts about that middle one.  The entire essay is about 3,500 words, or close to what I would write if I did a weeklong, five-part survey of Meredith that covered three novels, life-and-fame, etc., etc., although I would not dare employ Woolf’s enormously long paragraphs.

What does Woolf think is in Meredith's novels?  Here’s how the description of Feverel begins:

The style is extremely uneven.  Now he twists himself into iron knots; now he lies flat as a pancake.  He seems to be of two minds as to his intention.  Ironic comment alternates with long-winded narrative.  He vacillates from one attitude to another.  Indeed, the whole fabric seems to rock a little insecurely.

The reader wondering what Meredith’s novel might be about is still wondering.  In the next lines Woolf mentions a baronet, an ancestral home, “great ladies flaunting and swimming; the jolly farmers slapping their thighs,” “whiskers and bonnets.”  Honestly, I have no idea what the novel is about.  Why should I read it? “[T]he vigour of its intellectual power and its lyrical intensity” – that’s it.  The other novels are treated similarly.  Meredith is discussed entirely in terms of 1) style (“flamboyancy”) and 2) purpose.

Edmund Wilson was the finest writer of plot summaries I have ever encountered.  His pioneering essay on Marcel Proust (in Axel’s Castle, 1931) includes a long summary of the entirety of In Search of Lost Time, ingeniously woven into the fabric of the essay along with interpretation and biography.  Wilson is not assuming that his readers know the plot, quite the opposite.  The essay is a work of advocacy – read Proust!  Read all of it!  The meaning of the novel is inseparable from what happens.

He does the same thing with a more straightforward review of a brand new novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (in The Shores of Light, 1952, pp. 403-407), although the summation only takes two paragraphs.  "We are left with the prospect of the lady and her lover [doing what they do at the conclusion of the book]" – Wilson takes us right though the end of the novel.  His purpose, again, is serious.  He has to convince readers that Lawrence’s novel, already infamous as a dirty book, is artistically and ethically serious.  The “about” of the novel is indispensable.

By contrast, in a pair of short reviews of Willa Cather novels, One of Ours and The Lost Lady (pp. 39-43), Wilson efficiently crams all of the plot he wants into one longish sentence per novel, all the support he needs for his brief discussion of the quality of Cather’s prose and her methods of characterization.

I worry, sometimes, that I am too neglectful of the onerous but necessary duty of summary, that my dutiful readers skim through four days of Salammbô or Barchester Towers with increasing bafflement.  Look, one is about a bunch of barbarians besieging an ancient city, and the other is about a turf battle among pampered clergymen – I don’t quite remember which is which, but that’s not my point.  The stories in both novels are pleasurable to read, but I’m not convinced that they are terribly interesting to read about, even draped with Wilson’s expert prose, while Trollope’s asides and Flaubert’s earrings give me something to chew on.  Every novel has a story.  Many novels have excellent stories.  Very few have Mrs. Proudie or crucified lions.

Edmund Wilson's permanent criticism - in other words, he's still readable

One more glance at a Hudson Review article, this time "Edmund Wilson's Permanent Criticism: 1920-1950," (not online) a review essay on the two Library of America volumes of Wilson's work. The article is by William Pritchard, himself a favorite critic of mine.

Pritchard acknowledges a real intellectual debt to Wilson (as does the more ambivalent Joseph Epstein in an essay that can be found in In a Cardboard Belt!). The question for Pritchard is why a reader should spend time with Wilson now; Pritchard concludes, roughly, that Wilson wrote well enough and was insightful enough, so why not? That may not be exactly it, but any Amateur Reader who spends too much effort reading any critics is probably misallocating his time. There're a lot of books out there.

In my experience, Wilson does write well enough, and is insightful enough. His long essay on Proust, in Axel's Castle, is as good an introduction to that writer as I know, and might give a burst of momentum to any reader stuck halfway through The Guermantes Way. Wilson has a particularly strong gift with plot summaries - he describes the plot of In Search of Lost Time in detail, but somehow weaves his criticism in with the synopsis. The final result is utterly un-encyclopedic.

The Shores of Light, a thick collection of essays from the 20s and 30s, was less interesting to me for its specific insights than for its sense of The Spirit of the Age. The Wilson of that period wanted to read everything, and tried. His reviews of the promising young writers Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald communicate the thrill readers found in their books better than anything else I've read. Wilson makes the new writers of the time sound so exciting.

Here's Mark Sarvas, describing his Summer of [Philip] Roth, a reading or rereading of all or most of Roth's books, all in preparation for reviewing the new one. Whatever you do Mark, don't calculate your hourly wages for that review. Anyway, this is exactly what Edmund Wilson would do, read an author all the way through before reviewing him, no matter how long the shelf of books. He even decided that he had to learn Russian before he could understand the great Russian novels, and then he did it, more or less. The man could pack away the books.

P.S. Look, the Letter-writing Librarian recently read Axel's Castle, and wrote about it here.