Stanley Cavell
Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory
Stanford University Press, 2010
584 Pages
£31.50
ISBN 978-0804770149

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When Stanley Cavell first walked into the University of California at Berkeley’s music department as a young undergraduate ready to present himself as a music major, he overheard a conversation between a student and a teacher. “Whenever I hear that piece,” the teacher was telling the student, “I believe in immortality.” Cavell was exhilarated: “I had come to the right place.”

This short anecdote articulates the driving force behind Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory, Stanley Cavell’s recently released autobiography. Recounting his life from his childhood in the early 1920s to the publication of his fourth book, The Claim of Reason in 1979, the narrative takes the form of a diary written over 14 months, beginning on 2 July 2003, days before Cavell had to undergo surgery to catheterise his heart. Cavell is open about his fears, explaining that the purpose of the autobiography is “to begin learning whether I can write my way into and through the anxiety [of my mortality] by telling the story of my life.” Cavell wishes to recover the feeling he had when he walked into Berkeley’s music school 60 years earlier, the belief in immortality and the sense of having arrived at the right place.

Cavell once wrote that “to inherit philosophy you have already to be in the way of philosophy.” His stance is characteristically combative: one must face philosophy, and by blocking it one can acknowledge it and then begin to profess it. Little Did I Know undergoes its own combative process, despite the gentleness of Cavell’s language and the familiar ease of his phrasings. While describing his life, Cavell often moves from his past to his current moment of writing, even occasionally interrupting himself when he returns to reread his diary entries. By jumping forward and back in his narrative or by getting side-tracked by another encounter or present event, Cavell is constantly disrupting his own work. It is in his ability to intervene in his own storytelling to explain something further that the autobiography emerges as an important work of Cavellian philosophy. “[It] is philosophy’s undying task”, Cavell writes, “to show that the self-imprisoned human understanding is capable of self-arrest, self-reflection, self-overcoming.”

Strangely, Cavell describes the book as “a departure from my writing”, but for those who know Cavell’s philosophical work, his autobiography will seem nothing like a departure. Rather, it is striking how Little Did I Know feels like the sequel his readers have been anticipating—the culmination of his attempt to “speak philosophically for others when they recognise…that their language is mine, or put otherwise, that language is ours, that we are speakers.” Cavell’s struggle to claim his words, or his (our) language, has been prominent throughout his oeuvre. And while he has been openly autobiographical in the past, not least with his consistent use of a transcendentalist “I”, Little Did I Know opens up the deeper, more personal reasons Cavell has been drawn to the questions of ordinary language most famously explored by J.L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

This struggle, the reader discovers, has its origins in an inability to speak openly to his father (their communication had always been mediated by his mother). At the same time, a somewhat lonely childhood spent shuttling back and forth between Atlanta, Georgia and Sacramento, California left the young Cavell unsure of his position in relation to his peers, seeking solace in music before making the academic shift to professor of philosophy. The ten years it took for him to complete his PhD dissertation and the 18 more years it took him to revise it into The Claim of Reason underscore his uncertainty of writing clearly and his anxiety about the potential obscurity of language. Describing his journey from one academic institution to another—Berkley, Princeton, Harvard—Cavell tells us about the colleagues and friends he makes on his way (Ernest Bloch, J.L. Austin, Tom Clarke, Terence Malick, Jacque Derrida, to name but a few), and details the collapse of his first marriage followed by the surety and stability of his final one. Throughout his career, Cavell sought out people who spoke his language, eager to find his place as an ordinary language philosopher.

For Cavell, the speaker’s claim to language has always been entwined with the speaker’s position, not only in relation to philosophy and to other speakers, but also (and in some sense always) in relation to death. The proximity of death is never more prominent in Cavell’s work than in Little Did I Know. After all, every textual interruption reminds the reader of the heart surgery’s physical intrusion, so that death becomes the book’s touchstone, its greatest intervention. Thus it is hardly surprising that in 2004, while writing his autobiography, Cavell found himself transfixed by Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of Disaster, which “seems to me…to be all but paralyzed with the fear that it will not be able to go on, to begin again.” Blanchot reminds Cavell “of the later Wittgenstein’s achievement to lead thought perpetually to an end, to achieve a peace, however momentary, that acknowledges death.” Little Did I Know takes on the challenge of using ordinary language to face a real threat, the actual end to the writer’s thought. Thus, the memoir emerges not as a simple autobiography, but rather as the undertaking of the philosophical task Cavell has set, the attainment of peace through the repositioning of himself against his pending death.

That task of finding himself is illustrated within the first 30 pages of Little Did I Know. Cavell describes lying in hospital after being hit by a car when he was 6 years old, about to discover that one of his ears had been permanently damaged. He likens his moment of awakening with the waking up of the narrator in the opening pages of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Cavell finds solace in their similar experiences of “not knowing where to find [one]self.” It is here that we find ourselves at the crux of Cavell’s anxiety: figuring out where he stands. His autobiography becomes the marker of himself in history, the reminder to himself and to his readers that he exists in relation to all with which he interacts.

By the end of Cavell’s memoir, having come to a place where “memory has discovered itself to be inexhaustible”, the reader is left wondering where Cavell has discovered himself to be. In the final, strangely moving scene, Little Did I Know brings the reader into another hospital room, this time with Cavell’s father lying on a bed recovering from his own heart surgery. “Do you understand me?” asks his father, “…am I making sense to you right now? I know sometimes I get confused.” Cavell reassures his father that he is “perfectly clear”, but is unable to finish their conversation as his father falls asleep. “His position appeared awkward to me”, Cavell writes as he takes his leave, both from the hospital room and from the reader. We are left with the awkward moment hanging in the air, as though Cavell is no longer afraid of his own awkward position, confident of his ability to finally make sense.

Alexandra Manglis is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at Linacre College, Oxford.

Hitler’s personal architect Albert Speer narrowly dodged the scaffold at the Nuremberg war crime trials. He then busily spent the second half of last century attempting to convince the world that he was the most reluctant of enthusiastic Nazis. One who saw most clearly through his denials was Australian essayist and critic Clive James, whose father died fighting the Japanese in World War II. In a classic article published in the Observer in 1983, James skewered the shared megalomania of Speer and Hitler by describing a visit to the derelict Zeppelinfeld outside Nuremberg. Once the scene of vast Nazi pageants and rallies, it had become nothing more than an overgrown field littered with empty Fanta bottles.

James began that piece by describing Speer’s architectural “Theory of Ruin Value”. The idea was that Nazi buildings should be designed to appear in the distant future as “the great shards of the far past”—even in ruins they would remind the world of the power of the regime. In Nuremberg, James found the decades-old ruins of the 1000-year Reich not impressive, but “just sad”. And it had to be so: the Nazis’s pretense of building a great civilization was never more than a chimera. James found in Nuremberg that “the glory has not departed. It was never really there. Mostly it was made of cheap white light, and the free people came to turn off the power.”

It is almost impossible to describe adequately the life’s work of so varied and accomplished a writer as James—but one could do worse than begin with his description of Nuremberg. It is packed with James’s characteristic dry wit and delight at pointing out historic linkages and irony. Also revealing is the forum in which the article was first published; James cannily used the mainstream press and that most vapid of literary vehicles—the travel article, of all things—to tackle themes of Nazi guilt and historic memory. Part of James’s appeal is that he is a Cambridge-educated thinker who will use any medium available, from poetry to magazines, from travel-writing to television appearances, to speak to the public. James is an elite talent who has always refused to become elitist, driven foremost by the desire to be heard.

Last month, James, now 71, revealed that he had been diagnosed last year with leukemia. The announcement put in context a poem James had published in the New Statesman just a fortnight before. In this clearly autobiographical piece on mortality, James describes how his “year of feebleness” had killed “whatever gift I had for quick success”. One of the most prodigious writers of his generation had watched himself slow to “a single page/of double spaced” in half a day.

The somewhat maudlin tone of the poem might come as a surprise to those who are more aware of James the lively critic with an eye for the devastating put-down. This, after all, is the man who once described Arnold Schwarzenegger as looking like a “condom full of walnuts”, and Sydney Opera House as a typewriter stuffed with “oyster shells”. In fact, themes of time and mortality have often been features of James’s work. They are captured in the famous quip, frequently attributed to James (although its provenance is unclear), that we should “stop worrying—nobody gets out of this world alive”. It was also a central theme in his television series “Fame in the Twentieth Century”, which looked at the impermanence of celebrity and happiness. A revealing choice, given that James was by this time a household name in both England and Australia. Of fame, he was to conclude that “like happiness, [it] ruins anyone who pursues it for its own sake, and exalts only those who have proper work do to.”

Thoughts about time and decay permeate James’s travel writing. Over 30 years ago, in another great Observer piece, James described his trip to Rome: looking down from the plane he reflected that “those strings of lights were roads all leading to the one place”. Describing his visit James captured a common feeling among Australians in Europe, identifying it as a kind of vertigo or even discomfort at the extent of Europe’s history. Of Rome he concludes,

I still like the idea of what Lucretius describes as the reef of destruction to which all things must tend, spatio aetatis defessa vetusto -– worn out by the ancient lapse of years. But I don’t want to see the reef every day.

James wrote those words while a member of a close-knit set of London literary figures which included Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and Christopher Hitchens. Propped in city cafés, they shared long hours discussing words and writing. They were part of a marvelous, unparalleled generation of writers. And this generation is growing old.

Sadly, Hitchens too has recently revealed his own struggle with serious illness. That diagnosis was made during the promotion tour for his recently published autobiography Hitch 22. On hearing of Hitchens’s recent illness, his friend Martin Amis remarked that every writer is motivated by a desire to outlive their own life. So of Hitchens he explained “the desire for immortality explains all the extraordinary achievements, both good and bad.”

Amis’s words ring true. The desire to write is, at its heart, an exercise in hoping one’s own creations, theories, or ideas take on a life greater than their author’s. In a sense, it is an act of great egotism to wish that your innermost thoughts be captured in time and shared with other generations. For every writer who wants their work to be immortal, writing contains an implicit desire to outlive death. This is truer of James than most, as he has been driven to produce a prodigious amount over his life whilst rarely being out of the public eye. The great criticism sometimes made of James is the claim that he is an attention-seeker, but to an extent this misses the point of James’s writing. A diarist loves to write, but a writer loves nothing more than to be read.

In Australia, James is best known for his first autobiography, titled Unreliable Memoirs. Most Australian households seem to have a copy. James describes growing up in the suburbs of Sydney, before going abroad to attend university with other famous Australian ex-pats Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes (both thinly disguised in the book by pseudonyms), leaving Australia for “the mother country”. The book remains immensely popular: James’s nervous adolescence in the suburbs and ultimate success in England in some ways parallels Australia’s own growth away from England and into a more confident and independent country.

In an essay about the writer and performer Barry Humphries, another successful Australian ex-patriot, James pinpointed the reason for Humphries’s hometown popularity. James recognised the key to Humphries’s work in one sentence of his stage show dialogue, which read simply, “snails in the letterbox”. This would be baffling to any other audience, but Australians familiar with this particular problem “shouted with recognition”, finding joy in having their own strange country, and its gardens, reflected back at them. James claimed that Humphries was the first to discover that “in Australia the familiar is seen to be bizarre as soon as it is said. Or else the English language, fatigued by 12,000 miles of travel, cracks up under the strain of what it is forced to connote.” In this comment, though, James also reveals the secret to his own great popularity at home. At its best, much of James’s writing tells Australians things they already knew about themselves.

James’s third autobiography is almost equally treasured. In May Week Was in June (the title refers to the Cambridge tradition of postponing May Day celebrations until a time of their own convenience), James describes his years as a Cambridge student and member of the London writing scene. The book is notable for its unique description of English college life. While much has been written about arriving at Oxford or Cambridge in the full spring of youth, James tells a story about arriving as a rounded man, a graduate in a paradise for undergraduates, of respecting the fellows and dons without any risk of being in awe of them. In capturing the dissonance of being a fully formed person at an institution where most people come to find themselves, May Week Was in June remains the best description of the Australian post-graduate experience.

Though we may look forward to James’s career continuing for many more years, already by Amis’s measure James’s work has achieved a life of its own. The breadth of James’s work is immense, much of it now, happily, collated and accessible on a compendious website that contains hundreds of his varied essays. In a sense, James has achieved what he recognized as missing from the theory of ruin value and Speer’s vain attempt at immortality. James understood that a man cannot be outlasted by a greatness that never existed in the first place. Such is his skill and the joy already provided to decades of readers, he needn’t worry about his own legacy.

Benjamin Jellis is reading for a BCL at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Adam Sisman
Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2010
598 Pages
£25
ISBN 978-0297852148

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Adam Sisman’s new biography has a fascinating story to tell, and tells it very well. Its subject is the man variously described as “the leading historian of his generation”, “a relentless scourge of zealots, cheats, and bores”, and “a robot, without human experience, with no girls, no real friends, no capacity for intimacy and no desire to like or be liked”. Born into the fading gentry of Northumberland in 1914, Hugh Trevor-Roper underwent a rigorous education at Charterhouse and Christ Church, Oxford, spent a dramatic period monitoring German intelligence transmissions, and enjoyed an illustrious academic career as a fellow of Christ Church, then Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford (appointed in 1957 at the age of 43), and finally master of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He was also a long-standing correspondent for The Sunday Times, and wrote book reviews for a number of publications (many of these were reprinted in his volume Historical Essays, published in 1957). His standing, both academically and socially, was high indeed (he became the second husband of Earl Haig’s daughter Alexandra in 1954, and was raised to the peerage as Lord Dacre of Glanton in 1979); his fall, brought about by his unfortunate authentication of the forged Hitler Diaries in 1983, was all the greater for it. Yet he weathered this particularly turbulent storm and continued to produce work of outstanding quality, before succumbing to cancer in 2003 at the age of 89.

In many ways his career was unusual. Most professional historians do not attain popular recognition, and those that do often have to wait many years, even decades, for it. Not so Trevor-Roper. The Last Days of Hitler, a journalistic investigation into the fate of the Führer, remains his most famous work. He had been asked to solve this most pressing of mysteries by his former wartime colleague Dick White, then head of counter-intelligence in the British sector of Berlin and later head of MI5 and MI6 in succession. The book appeared in 1947, and was only his second (he never thought very highly of his first, a study of Archbishop Laud published in 1940). It made his name and his fortune. It also established him as an authority on Nazi Germany, a subject he would frequently revisit in print and even on television in a notable debate with his Oxford colleague and sparring partner AJP Taylor. But it has tended to overshadow his more scholarly output. Although first and foremost a historian of the 16th and 17th centuries, Trevor-Roper never confined himself to this period. He wrote on Hitler; he wrote on Homer; he wrote on most subjects in between.

He also wrote brilliantly. A dazzling essayist and letter-writer, he fully appreciated the value of a lucid prose style in putting across his point. His assessments of figures past and present were always memorable and often devastating. Queen Christina of Sweden was “that dreadful woman, the Cartesian princess, the crowned termagant and predatory bluestocking of the north”, CS Lewis “a purple-faced bachelor and misogynist, living alone in rooms of inconceivable hideousness, secretly consuming vast quantities of his favourite dish, beefsteak-and-kidney pudding.” Anthony Eden got off rather lightly in comparison, being merely a “vain, ineffectual Man of Blood”. The index of a Trevor-Roper volume was always essential reading; this specimen, from the index to his Renaissance Essays, was not untypical:

Jesuits: impose orthodoxy on all sciences, 193-4; and arts, 234; adapt humanist history, 138; drain humanism of its content, 229; creep in everywhere, 216; including China, 252; the Pope’s janissaries, 268; have mastered the mechanics of power, 229; constant allies of Spain, 279, 284; the courtliest of religious orders, 289; hated by de Thou, 136; and by the university of Paris, 207; but unstoppable, 229; ‘Hell-born’, 250

Like de Thou, Trevor-Roper had little time for the Jesuits. He had little time for clerics in general. Yet good sense and shrewd historical understanding always trumped his prejudices. Assessing the crusades in one of a series of lectures later published as The Rise of Christian Europe, he might have been expected to line up behind his 18th-century heroes Gibbon and Voltaire in outright condemnation of the movement. This is not what happened. Whatever his personal feelings on the subject, he sought to place the movement in a wider context, as one facet of the high medieval expansion of Europe in which spiritual and economic motivations were intermingled. The account he produced was characteristically perceptive.

Trevor-Roper’s merits and successes were numerous, yet there were failures also, and these Sisman does not neglect. He started many books, but finished few; his magnum opus on the Puritan Revolution never appeared. After his death much material was, and continues to be, salvaged from his manuscripts; much remains. Failure of this kind has dogged many historians, and for many different reasons. Sisman suggests, convincingly, that the problem for Trevor-Roper was not the sheer amount of archival research necessary before such a work could be written, although this was certainly substantial, but his perfectionism. Each essay he wrote went through numerous drafts before publication; to prepare to the same standard a multi-volume work of the kind he envisaged was necessarily a laborious and lengthy endeavour. In so doing he found himself continually overtaken by new research, as well as distracted by the demands of teaching and other college duties (not to mention other historical projects that also came to nothing), and the endeavour ultimately proved abortive. In any case, the essay form suited him better; it is on these that his scholarly reputation rests.

This is the Hugh Trevor-Roper that emerges from the pages of Sisman’s vivid and impressive biography: reticent in person, effervescent in prose, possessed of a brilliant mind but burdened with expectations he never quite fulfilled, he fully deserves the lengthy treatment Sisman gives him. Sisman is careful to evoke in detail the various environments in which his subject lived and worked, and he provides a wonderful gallery of supporting players. There is Trevor-Roper’s early mentor, the effete literary scholar Logan Pearsall Smith, forever pressing him about the most intimate details of his private life; Smith’s brother-in-law Bernard Berenson, the renowned art historian, at whose Florentine villa Trevor-Roper often stayed, and with whom he enjoyed a lengthy correspondence (his letters to Berenson were published in 2006); the philosophers Gilbert Ryle and Freddie Ayer, the former a wartime colleague of Trevor-Roper; the Russian spy Kim Philby, another wartime colleague and later subject of his short book The Philby Affair; Rupert Murdoch, “a megalomaniac twister, surrounded by yes-men and hatchet-men,” as Trevor-Roper once put it; and many others. The book is, furthermore, a remarkable chronicle of Oxbridge academic life over the course of the 20th century. Of particular interest are the machinations of the Peterhouse common room during Trevor-Roper’s tenure as master, when a coterie of reactionary fellows headed by Maurice Cowling sought to undermine the man who, contrary to expectation, was not prepared to stem the forces of modernisation. It is a shame that this phase of his life receives comparatively less coverage than others; indeed, his last 20 years are dealt with in little more than 30 pages. But it would be churlish to criticise this imbalance, for the author’s hand has (understandably) been stayed by defamation law, as he explains in his introduction.

Now if Sisman is less detailed here than one would like, there are also moments when he is more detailed than he perhaps ought to be. While he has explicitly made every effort to avoid such pitfalls, some of the anecdotes, clearly told to him by Trevor-Roper himself, come across as rather fanciful. Several such tales are to be found in relation to his undergraduate days and pre-war jaunts in Europe; most notable of all, and seemingly uncorroborated by diary evidence, is the account of a 1935 trip to Germany, in which Trevor-Roper dodged belligerent Nazi missionaries, won vast sums at a casino in Baden-Baden, and was forced to post his money out of the country to ensure its safety (not to mention his own). For one who could breathe life into seemingly the dullest historical topics, such embellishments were no doubt routine, and Sisman is to be congratulated on the fact that only very occasionally does his narrative fail to ring true. Indeed, he is to be congratulated on a biography that is, for the most part, hard to fault. Other, more detailed treatments of Trevor-Roper’s historical works and philosophy are available, for instance John Robertson’s recent piece in the English Historical Review. But it is no mean feat to wrest a compelling and illuminating narrative out of the mass of correspondence and diary entries that confronts the chronicler of such an eventful life, and this is precisely what Sisman has achieved.

Hugh Reid is reading for a DPhil in History at Lincoln College, Oxford.

Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica, ed. Anthony Thwaite
Faber and Faber, 2010
496 Pages
£22.50
ISBN 978-0571239092

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On 17 March, 1958, Philip Larkin sent the following list in a letter to Monica Jones, his longtime companion:

Nice	Nasty
Rabbits	Ferrets
Pints of draught	Halves of bottled
Men & women	Children
Fires	Convector heating
Books	Talk
Readers	Writers
(some of them)	(all of them)

Though it is unfair to diminish a man’s character to a list of likes and dislikes, this chart represents the sort of relationship Larkin shared with Monica: one of tongue-in-cheek, disinterested coarseness and genuine affinity. To most, Larkin is best known as the poet of “This be the Verse” (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad”) and “Toads” (“Why should I let the toad work / squat on my life?”). To the patient and intelligent Monica Jones (“dearest bun”), however, he was an affectionate and cheeky kindred spirit, if only a mediocre lover (“I’m sorry that our lovemaking fizzled out in Devon…”). An unpleasantly gloomy poet, Larkin’s discontent and wit have fused to create a colloquial candour that has brought him standing as one of the greatest poets of the latter part of 20th century. The 1,400 letters and 500 postcards, which were bought by the Bodleian in 2004, had been deemed lost until recently. This collection, compiled and edited by Anthony Thwaite, neither softens nor reaffirms the rough-around-the-edges Larkin we know; rather, it presents Larkin-the-poet as Larkin-the-everyday-lover: an undecided, complex yet common man.

Neither Larkin nor Jones have enjoyed flattering posthumous reputations, with Larkin’s Selected Letters doing little to help the situation. For many years, Larkin’s reputation was strained by how little we knew about him—his journals were dutifully shredded and burnt by his colleague Betty Mackereth, and until Monica’s death in 2001, we were limited to his correspondence with his mother and with male friends such as Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest. These letters, often about jazz, porn, or immigrants, presented Larkin as a habitual racist and full-time misogynist. His letters to Monica, by contrast, track their relationship over nearly four decades of minutiae, absurdity, literature, food, rabbits (including drawings), and poetry. Despite his literary fame, Larkin was known as a misanthrope, avoided the media, and was ill-suited to a public life, while Monica died an alcoholic and an unaccomplished academic at the University of Leicester (she published nothing at all in 40 years; though, to be fair, at a time when the stigma of “publish or perish” was not yet in place). Larkin met Monica at the University of Leicester in 1946 when they were both 24, he a librarian, she an assistant lecturer—titles they retained their entire lives. Both had studied at Oxford but never crossed paths.

Larkin writes to Monica almost as though he were writing to himself—the stark frankness of the letters sheds light on what may have been lost in the burnt journals—musings on taboo topics, private personal opinions, or the details of his eating habits. Thwaite’s collection, albeit carefully selected, does not attempt to conceal or apologise for Larkin’s character. Rather, it is presented in the same relaxed privacy that Larkin shared with Jones; he felt she would not judge him for his shortcomings, regardless of how crude they may have seemed to others. He even shared with her his subscription to Swish magazine (“Jolly good stuff, Swish”).

Perhaps it was expected that the publication of these private letters would soften Larkin’s notoriety somewhat. Although the collection is of a different nature (private, loving) than the Larkin we have seen before, it presents him gingerly, but fairly. Thwaite makes no attempt to hide the unpleasant. Larkin is still self-deprecating, valuing his “selfish life” essential to the poetry over married life with Monica.

In making his selection, Thwaite has chosen not to focus on any one particular aspect of Larkin’s life and relationship—neither the literary nor the personal takes precedence over the other. Larkin’s letters are indeed “jolly good stuff” themselves, refreshingly crude, holding little back. Jonathan Bate, reviewing the letters, complains: “And one could perhaps have done without the bottom fetish that is revealed when he salivates over the memory of Monica hitching her skirt around her waist and letting him see her black nylon panties with a small hole in them.” Why done without? Sometimes it’s nice to know that poets like bottoms, too. Bate’s concern about oversharing holds ground when reading the letters for insight into Larkin’s literary life. But reading them as love letters, which, peculiar as they are, is their nature, such intimate details contribute to a complete picture of the poet. We are no longer mere readers of his poetry, distanced by a book, but become the neighbours next door, partaking in his relationship as observers and eavesdroppers. This voyeuristic element is precisely what such a collection of letters captures: surely Larkin never intended for them to be published. Knowing about his preference for spanking or affinity for Beatrix Potter rightly makes it increasingly harder to stereotype him. Aspects of Larkin’s personal life and preferences in the letters do not need to be tolerated on account of their literary value; they provide value in and of themselves.

However, the letters do return often to his opinions of writers, living and dead. He categorises writers, “all of them”, as nasty, himself included. In an earlier letter, he compiles a list comparing Hardy to Yeats. The results were clear: Hardy, nice–Yeats, nasty. Humorously self-deprecating, he also seems to be aware of his own worth as a poet, even if it is admitted begrudgingly. At other times, his self-pity is less likeable: “I’ve no friends. Really I feel like a plant in a pot that nobody waters.” Often, he writes about his inability to write; only letters to Monica come naturally, sometimes selfish, other times apologetic, but always earnest:

Monday Ah! Letter from you today. I’m not one of the save-it-to-read-in-the-apple-tree school. I tear it open instantly and walk slowly upstairs reading it, not taking off my scarf & raincoat till I’ve finished. Very nice! We both seem a bit drab at present, witness this letter to date, you with reason, me without. How dreary & depressing this room-hunt is! Everything looks its worst when seen in such circumstances!

Although the collection only contains letters from Larkin to Monica, her own side of the correspondence is not entirely lacking; indeed, her loud voice often comes through. Following a trip to Grasmere, Larkin reprimands her speaking manners: “But for all that, I do want to urge you, with all love & kindness, to think about how much you say & how you say it.” He goes so far as to create three rules which she is to follow. Like listening in on a one-sided phone conversation, the silences and nods are filled in by the observant party. One can almost hear her line of argument about marriage, in contrast to Larkin’s distinguished hesitant stance: “…To me the strain would be the constant lack of solitude, the never-being able-to-relax[…] Is it better to die of disintegration or of continual watchfulness?” Six years later, in 1957, he was still mulling it over:

As you know, I think we are very queer—queerer than you do—but I can’t swear that if we were better at ‘the physical side of things’ […] I shouldn’t find some other excuse for not marrying. But if I don’t want to marry you then I don’t see why I should mind not doing so, & if I do then I don’t see why I don’t.

The letters do not read quickly. Laden with the quotidian, they provide a dreary portrait of Larkin—cooking, cleaning, complaining: “I had an awful experience with some pearl barley not long ago, that stuck to the pan and burnt. I nurse stews like a candidate nursing a constituency”. In small doses, however, they paint a charming picture of a strange man in a strangely misanthropic relationship:

Dear bun, I know what you mean about turning life into art—I sometimes have you with me for long stretches, noticing things together—actually, that sounds horrible, but yesterday I walked up the Lisburn Roads, a very dull road, for about 2 miles, a road nobody would ever walk along for pleasure—rather like, say, the Melton Road in Leicester, but I enjoyed it & so wd you, & I thought as much at the time. Simple pleasures!

Reading their 40-year correspondence, there is no doubt that he loved her and wanted to share his life with her, however mundane. But only those mundane bits he chose out for her; “I have four rolls of pink toilet paper on my low table…” It was not until 1981, four years before his death, that he finally agreed to her moving in with him. His character would perhaps be easier to stomach if one keeps in mind that the letters to Monica were read not in a weekend but over 40 years. Only then does the ordinary and deliberately quotidian become, well, almost sweet. His bleak vignettes add a comic element to his character, sometimes softened, sometimes as unpleasant as we knew him, but always presenting a much more complete and thereby complex picture of the poet in his most private affairs. Nothing, however, gives away his gloomy humour and the freedom he shared with Monica better than this beginning of a letter:

Dearest bun,

Morning, noon & bloody night,
Seven sodding days a week,
I slave at filthy work, that might
Be done by any book-drunk freak.
This goes on ‘till I kick the bucket:
FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT.

Nice to be a pawet, ya knaw, an express ya feeling. Eh?

Judyta Frodyma graduated in 2010 with an MSt in English Literature from Worcester College, Oxford.

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Oscar Wilde would describe his undergraduate years at Magdalen College (1874 – 1878) as the most “flower-like” of his life; he may also have been thinking of his time there when he remarked: “I may not have sown any wild oats, but I did plant a few orchids.” The young Irishman had decided, in 1874, to complete in Oxford the classics degree he had begun at Trinity College, Dublin three years previously.

At Magdalen, Wilde flourished in variegated ways. He mastered the rigors of the literae humaniores or “Greats” course, carrying off a first in his honour moderations examination in 1876, a success which prompted him to contemplate pursuing an academic career. During his undergraduate years Wilde also perfected the persona—part aesthete, part Disraelian dandy, and part Athenian philosopher—with which he would later make a splash in London’s artistic and social circles.

The aesthetic flaneur who liked to pose as a “dilettante trifling with his books” at Oxford was really only pretending to be wicked. The truth was, Wilde read hard “surreptitiously, into the small hours” in a bedroom bursting with books and cigarette smoke. Along with all the primary and secondary set texts of his Greats course, he devoured at Magdalen the writings of Hegel, Kant, Schopenhauer, Darwin, Clifford, Buckle, and Spencer, drawing from them the central tenets of his own intellectual credo. He wrote out quotations from these authors into a series of marble-boarded notebooks, which evidence the perspiration as well as the inspiration behind his extraordinary culture. Wilde’s poetry also blossomed at Oxford. It was at Magdalen that he refined a poetic voice and language that was eclectic and flexible, penning verses that impressed the editors of various Oxford and Dublin magazines.

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Wilde made another extravagant advance at Oxford—in the art of English prose. It was Walter Pater, the Brasenose Classics tutor, and sinless master of purple aesthetic prose, who influenced him in this context, as in so many others. “Why do you always write poetry?” the diffident don asked the Magdalen undergraduate at their first meeting, “Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult”. Wilde later confessed that he “did not quite comprehend what Mr. Pater really meant,” having always supposed, from his reading of Carlyle and Ruskin, that prose sprang “from enthusiasm rather than from art. I did not [know],” he admitted, “that even prophets correct their proofs.” “And it was not,” he remembered, “until I carefully studied [Pater’s own] beautiful and suggestive essays on the Renaissance that I fully realised what a wonderful self-conscious art the art of English prose-writing really is. Pater’s essays became to me ‘the golden book of spirit and sense, the holy writ of beauty’.”

Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873)— the book that, as Wilde famously remarked, had “such a strange influence over [his] life”—contains essays on philosophers, poets, and artists of the Renaissance such as Leonardo, Botticelli, and Michelangelo. Pater enters into a work of art imaginatively, elucidating the impression it makes on him and defining its especial character. He calls this the “true truth” about an artwork, next to which the factual truths concerning its production and history are insignificant. Pater developed a distinctive impressionistic, and unashamedly subjective style, in which he could at once convey these ‘true truths’, vividly evoke the works of art under discussion, and also celebrate the ecstasy of the “aesthetic experience”, art offering, in his view, a heightened form of sensual and spiritual pleasure rather than moral or intellectual instruction. The baroque prose poems Pater carved with such fastidious care were aimed at a cultivated general readership, rather than at scrupulous Oxford scholars, who were not slow to point out their inaccuracies.

Pater probably advised Wilde to commence his apprenticeship as an author by imitating the best prose models. The don had a considerable gift for mimicry, which Wilde admired intensely; he later praised Pater’s ability to echo, in his critical prose, “the colour and accent and tone” of whichever writer he happened to be analysing. The idea of imitation as the best beginning for a budding writer was, in any case, a commonplace of the period, and the practice was second nature to classicists such as Pater and Wilde. As part of his Greats course Wilde regularly translated lines of Greek and Latin into particular styles of English verse or prose (and vice versa), rendering Homer into colloquial Elizabethan English or Wordsworth into the ancient Greek characteristic of the comic verse fragments. Wilde had learned how to replicate the style of authors such as Euripides or Virgil as a schoolboy in Ireland, where the “flowing beauty” of his imitations and translations were, according to his peers, “a thing not easily to be forgotten.”

In the early days of his apprenticeship Wilde attempted to “play the sedulous ape” to Pater himself. The Irishman copied many of the stylistic effects of the man he addressed as “the great master” in the review he penned in 1877 of the paintings in the Grosvenor Gallery, his first substantial published prose work. In the article, Wilde’s syntax, cadences, and rhythms are consciously Paterian: “The picture is full of magic;” he writes of a Burne-Jones, copying Pater’s rococo manner, “and the colour is truly a spirit dwelling on things and making them expressive to the spirit, for the delicate tones of grey, and green, and violet seem to convey to us the idea of languid sleep, and even the hawthorn-blossoms have lost their wonted brightness, and are more like the pale moonlight to which Shelley compared them, than the sheet of summer snow we see now in our English fields.”

Wilde proudly showed his Grosvenor Gallery article to Pater, who discovered within it clear evidence of “cultivated tastes”, as well countless “pleasant expressions”—which is hardly surprising as so many of them were borrowed from his own writings. The don must have been especially gratified by Wilde’s rhapsodic coda on “that revival of beauty which in a great part owes its birth to Mr. Ruskin, and which Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Pater, and Mr. Symonds, and Mr. Morris and many others, are fostering and keeping alive, each in his own peculiar fashion.”

It seems likely that Wilde attempted, during his Oxford days, to imitate, and so absorb into his own writing, the styles of all the authors he names in this roll call of personal favourites. The assimilation of their styles was achieved by long and concentrated reading, and by conscious mimicry. This was certainly the Magdalen man’s method with two of the writers he mentioned in his article—John Addington Symonds and Algernon Swinburne. I will focus on Wilde’s intense engagement with this pair of English authors here.

The choice of these two particular Wildean prose models is dictated by circumstance. Wilde’s undergraduate copies of Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets and Swinburne’s Essays and Studies have survived, and the copious annotations and markings they contain allow us to recreate something of Wilde’s readerly-writerly encounter with the prose styles of these authors. The whereabouts of his volumes of Ruskin, Pater, and Morris is, on the other hand, currently unknown. Wilde’s library was sold at a public auction, during the time of his trials for “acts of gross indecency” in 1895, at the insistence of his creditors. Secured at the sale by book dealers and collectors, Wilde’s beloved books were subsequently dispersed throughout the world. Today we know only the whereabouts of 70 or so volumes from his collection of over 2000 volumes.

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John Addington Symonds’s two-volume Studies of the Greek Poets (1873 & 1876) was another of Wilde’s “golden books”. He read the first volume, Studies (first series), at 20, while studying for his classics degree at Trinity. Purchasing the book in the year of its publication, he dated it “Dec 73” and autographed it “Oscar Wilde”. A Trinity contemporary would recall Wilde’s love of Studies—the book was, he remembered, perpetually in Wilde’s hands. Three years later, Wilde, now at Magdalen, purchased Studies (second series) (i.e. volume II), hot off the printing press, dating his copy “May ’76”, the month of the book’s publication, and autographing the title page “Oscar F. O’F. W. Wilde. S. M. Magdalen College, Oxford.” Wilde’s copy of the two-volumed Studies is now in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. The extensive annotations and markings inside it testify to the strong impression the book made on the young Wilde.

Wilde’s ostentatiously advertised fondness for Symonds may have been part of the aesthetic persona he was inventing for himself, and parading before others. Symonds’s impressionistic form of aesthetic criticism was not unlike that of Pater; moreover, in the first volume of Studies, the word “aesthetic” is used on a number of occasions to characterise Greek morality, in contrast to Christian ethics. Wilde was, however, first drawn to Symonds’s book as a student of classical literature. Studies (first series) was well known to the Reverend J.P. Mahaffy, one of Wilde’s classics tutors at Trinity, and also recommended reading for Greats students at Oxford.

Studies offers an imaginative analysis of most of the surviving corpus of Greek literature; Symonds also discusses Greek historiography, mythology, philosophy, and the genius of Greek art. In the late 19th century, classical works were often regarded, in Mahaffy’s words, as “mere treasure-houses of roots and forms to be sought out by comparative grammarians”, with many classicists focusing solely on the linguistic minutiae of the texts. The historicist school of scholarship was also prominent in the period, just as it is in our own day. Its aim was to place and interpret classical works exclusively within the historical context in which they were produced.

In Studies, Symonds eschewed both philological and historicist approaches. He attempted instead to enter into a stimulating dialogue, across the centuries, with the ancients. He regarded the Greeks as essentially modern men, whose literature spoke directly to 19th-century readers. He also believed that the ancients had exercised a profound influence on contemporary culture. “Except the blind forces of nature,” he declared, “nothing moves in this world that is not Greek in its origin”—a phrase that Wilde would quote with approval. Symonds drew attention to the many points at which modern and ancient cultures touched, comparing Aristophanes to Mozart, Aeschylus to Shakespeare, Greek Myth to Medieval Romance, and Greek drama to European Opera. Wilde marked many of these parallels in his copy of Studies.

Wilde enthusiastically embraced Symonds’s approach to the ancients. At the beginning of July 1876, a couple of months after he had purchased Studies (second series), Wilde took a viva voce as part of his mods exam. When asked to discuss Aeschylus, he talked, among other things, of Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, thus employing Symonds’s specific parallels as well as his general method.

The style of Studies was as essential as its subject for the young Wilde, eager as he was to master the “difficult” art of English prose. Years later Wilde would criticise the “rhetoric and over-emphasis” of some of Symonds’s writing—when it was good, he believed, it was very, very good, but when it was bad, it was florid. During his undergraduate days, however, Wilde adored Symonds’s style, excrescences, fustian bombast, and all. With an eye to identifying Symonds’s stylistic mannerisms, he marked, in his copy of Studies, the more than usually extravagant metaphors, such as the author’s comparison of the Hermaphrodite “in whom the two sexes are hidden” to “a bitter and a sweet almond in one beautiful but barren husk.” Next to a typically poetic phrase “Calm mornings of sunshine visit us at times in early November, appearing like glimpses of departed spring,” Wilde has written the words “very charming”. Reading this, we can almost hear the young aesthete murmur the words to himself with pleasure, “turning over the leaves” of the volume, as he would say in another context, “tasting” the words, “as one tastes wine.” (Incidentally, Wilde seems to have literally, as well as metaphorically, tasted wine while he read Symonds. On page 12 of the first volume of Studies there is a marginal blemish which appears to have been made by a drop of red, or as Wilde called it, purple wine.)

As part of his bid to assimilate Symonds’s style, Wilde copied phrases from Studies into his marble-boarded notebooks, sometimes giving them a personal inflection as he transcribed. Symonds’s sentence “The Greeks had no past: ‘no hungry generations trod them down’: whereas the multitudinous associations of immense antiquity envelop all our thoughts and feelings” became, in Wilde’s rendition: “Life came naturally to the Greeks, we ‘whom the hungry generations tread down’, barely attain to the gladness that was their immediate heritage.” Here we see the fledgling author measuring his style against that of one of his masters.

Wilde was so taken with Symonds’s book that he decided to write about it. In the summer of 1876, during his long vacation in Ireland, the Magdalen man embarked on an essay concerning Studies titled “The Women of Homer”. This lengthy prose work, which is probably the first essay Wilde wrote with a non-scholarly audience in mind, survives in unfinished and fragmentary manuscript form. Wilde took his title from a chapter in Symonds’s book, in which the Homeric heroines are evoked in painterly prose. In a letter to an Oxford friend, Wilde referred to his essay as a review of Studies, and on occasion, in “The Women of Homer”, he adopted the imperious tone of a reviewer: “but Mr Symonds is perhaps right” he commented at one point; “I think Mr Symonds is open to censure”, he said at another.

Most of the piece, however, is comprised of Wilde’s own translations and renditions of the scenes from the Odyssey and the Iliad in which Homer’s heroines feature. It is likely, therefore, that the essay is Wilde’s own attempt to write a vivid introductory essay on Homer’s heroines, rather than a conventional critical appraisal of Studies. Wilde may have hoped to place the piece in a magazine aimed at general readers, or in an encyclopaedia or school textbook. Alternatively, the essay may have formed the basis of a lecture he gave (or planned to give) in Dublin. Either way, Wilde abandoned the manuscript of “The Women of Homer” some 8,500 words in and would publish no essay on the theme at this time. The manuscript is today held at the Morgan Library, and has recently been published, for the first time, both in its unfinished manuscript form and as an edited and reconstructed reading text in Oscar Wilde: The Women of Homer (eds. Thomas Wright & Don Mead).

In “The Women of Homer”, Wilde was outlandish in his praise of Symonds’s style, at one point suggesting that it was expressive and elegant enough to convey even the beauty of Helen of Troy. Symonds’s prose, Wilde gushed, evinced “a strong love of all that is really beautiful and really pathetic”, along with “all the picturesqueness and loveliness of words that we admire so much in Mr Ruskin and Mr Pater.” Picturesqueness was, in Wilde’s view, the defining quality of Symonds’s style; he would later employ that epithet again in the newspaper reviews he penned of the books Symonds published in the 1880s.

Throughout “The Women of Homer” Wilde played the sedulous ape to Symonds. His general approach to Homer’s heroines is identical to that of Studies—the Magdalen man produced a form of impressionistic or aesthetic criticism in which Homeric scenes were summarised and vividly evoked through paraphrase and translation, rather than dissected analytically. The young Magdalen man’s style, like that of Symonds or Pater, was subjective and richly coloured by enthusiasm and emotion.

Wilde also directly echoed Symonds in many specific instances. “And so it is”, he wrote, “with consummate art that Homer has drawn [Nausicaa] following the cunning Circe and the enchantress Calypso. When we come face to face with Nausicaa it is like leaving a hot conservatory for the fresh spring air, or a crowded gaslit room for the soft breezes and silver glories of the night.’” These lines mimicked Symonds’s own comments on Nausicaa: “Odysseus,” he says, “passes straight from the solitary island of Ogygia, … into the company of this real woman. It is like coming from a land of dreams into a dewy garden when the sun has risen.”

Wilde audaciously attempted, on occasion, to “out-Symonds Symonds” for richness of word music and poetic extravagance. “The scene”, wrote Wilde of Andromache’s final parting from Hector, “is as the white blossom of an almond tree that our hands can not reach, though its perfume is brought to us by the wind; it is an eternal flower on the trees of sorrow, bright with the dews of many tears.” Reading these lines out of context, it would be impossible to say whether they came from the pen of Symonds or Wilde.

Wilde’s imitations are hardly a form of plagiarism, but there are occasions in “The Women of Homer” where he borrowed Symonds’s ideas, in the process of mimicking his style—something that could be classed as a species of literary theft. Wilde’s phrase, “Yet Helen did not all die. Marlowe made Faustus bring her from the dead to be his paramour”, is clearly derived from Symonds’s remark that “the Romance of Helen of Troy…blazed forth again in the pregnant myth of Faustus. The final achievement of Faust’s magic was to evoke Helen from the dead and hold her his paramour”. In this case, it could be argued that stylistic imitation has become, almost imperceptibly, the unacknowledged appropriation of an idea.

“The Women of Homer” was an ambitious experiment in style for a young Oxonian to have undertaken. Having marked his favourite Symonds phrases in his copy of Studies, and having transferred some of them into his notebooks, Wilde tried his hand at producing variations on the style of one of his masters. The result is uneven, with Wilde sometimes reproducing the worst excesses of his model and often lapsing into a “Wardour Street English” that is embarrassingly quaint; yet as an attempt to master Symonds’s style, the exercise was a resounding success.

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A year after the apprentice author wrestled with Symonds’s style, in the margins of his copy of Studies, in his notebooks, and in the manuscript leaves of “The Women of Homer”, Wilde picked up Algernon Swinburne’s Essays and Studies (second edition, London, 1876). His copy, which is autographed “Oscar Wilde / Magdalen College. / July. 1877”, has recently come to light.

Wilde’s devotion and indebtedness to what he called the “very perfect and very poisonous” poetry of Swinburne is well known. At Magdalen the English spokesman of aestheticism was the Irishman’s “only poet”. Wilde often read the “marvellous music-maker” in his college rooms, mischievously describing himself, in one Oxford letter, as lying “in bed with Swinburne (a copy of)”. Wilde declared that he would rather have written Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (first series, 1866) than any other book. According to some critics, he came perilously close to doing so in his own volumes of poetry, which were so saturated with Swinburnian echoes that they would be uncharitably dismissed as “Swinburne and water”.

Much less is known about the influence of Swinburne’s prose style on Wilde, though the markings in Wilde’s copy of Essays and Studies suggest that it was profound. Swinburne’s volume is an anthology of 11 lengthy critical essays, nine of which were originally written for the distinguished monthly the Fortnightly Review, and two as introductions to volumes of Byron’s and Coleridge’s poetry. Along with his appraisals of those two authors, Swinburne surveys the works of Hugo (in two separate articles), Rossetti, Morris, Arnold, Shelley, and John Ford. The collection ends with the two art essays: “Notes on Designs [i.e. drawings] of the Old Masters at Florence” and “Notes on Some Pictures of 1868”.

Swinburne served up an intimate and idiosyncratic brand of aesthetic criticism. Like Symonds and Pater, he offered vivid evocations of works of art rather than detached scholarly analysis; he was invariably more interested in the impression they made upon him than in their intrinsic qualities or the facts concerning their history. In mimicking this style of writing, Wilde was consciously aligning himself with the aesthetic movement and moving away from the academic style required of him as a Greats student, or indeed as an aspiring don. At Magdalen, Wilde was, as we know, uncertain as to which professional route he would follow—that of an Oxford academic or that of a popular writer in London; the aesthetic style of Pater, Symonds, and Swinburne worked on him like a siren song, luring him toward the latter path.

Swiunburne’s essays were also aesthetic in the more obvious sense that they zealously expounded the credo of aestheticism. The young Wilde absorbed wholesale many of Swinburne’s aesthetic pronouncements, marking them in his copy of Essays and Studies and rehearsing them in his later writings. On page 47 of Wilde’s copy there is a tick next to the phrase: “For art is very life itself, and knows nothing of death; she is absolute truth and takes no care of fact; she sees that Achilles and Ulysses are even now more actual by far than Wellington and Talleyrand; not merely more noble and interesting as types and figures, but more positive and real …” In “The English Renaissance of Art”, the first talk Wilde would give during his 1882 lecture tour of America, where he was billed as the “spokesman of Aestheticism”, these lines are repeated almost verbatim: “For art is very life itself and knows nothing of death;” Wilde remarks, “she is absolute truth and takes no care of fact; she sees (as I remember Mr Swinburne insisting on at dinner) that Achilles is even now more actual and real than Wellington, not merely more noble and interesting as a type but more positive and real”. (It is rather amusing that Wilde claimed to have heard Swinburne utter these words at dinner. As the pair are said to have only ever attended one dinner party together, and on that occasion, apparently spoke only briefly. Wilde must have made the anecdote up in a bid to impress his audience.)

In his essay on Arnold, Swinburne declares that there are two qualities of an artistic production that are bound to please the elect and annoy the many—”perfection of the work, and personality in the workman”. Wilde echoed this artistic formula on numerous occasions, the first occasion being in his 1882 essay “L’Envoi”, where he writes: “Whatever work we have in the Nineteenth Century must rest on the two poles of personality and perfection”. Wilde marked another of Swinburne’s famous aesthetic tenets in his copy of Essays and Studies: “The essence of an artist is that he should be articulate”. Once again, Wilde recycled this in “The English Renaissance”, where he remarked: “‘The artist’, as Mr. Swinburne says, ‘must be perfectly articulate.’”

Wilde’s markings suggest that he paid as much attention to the style of Essays and Studies as he did to its substance. He evidently read with the aim of divining and absorbing the secret of Swinburne’s manner, just as he had done in the case of Symonds’s Studies. In a letter written to a friend in 1877, the penultimate year of his Greats course, Wilde mulled over the possibility of taking up art criticism as a career. We might, in consequence, reasonably expect him to have paid especial attention to the two art essays included in Essays and Studies. In particular, we might assume that he would have been drawn to Swinburne’s lush evocations of pictures, as they are precisely the sort of impressionistic prose set pieces out of which Wilde built his own 1877 essay on the paintings in the Grosvenor Gallery exhibition.

The following description of a drawing of Salome by Andrea del Sarto is representative of Swinburne’s style: “Salome dances before Herod, an incarnate figure of music, grave and graceful, light and glad, the song of a bird made flesh, with perfect poise of her sweet slight body from maiden face to melodious feet; no tyrannous or treacherous goddess of deadly beauty, but a simple virgin, with the cold charm of girlhood and the mobile charm of childhood; as indifferent and innocent when she stands before Herodias and when she receives the severed head of John with her slender and steady hands; a pure bright animal, knowing nothing of man, and of life nothing but instinct and motion.”

This long and luxuriant sentence, in its elegant use of assonance and antithesis, and in its addiction to alliteration, as well as in its measured cadence, is so close to Wilde’s later prose that it might be mistaken for it. Yet neither this phrase, nor the countless other vivid lines that illuminate Swinburne’s art criticism, have been marked in Wilde’s copy of Essays and Studies. As he read, Wilde was evidently able to saturate himself in the music of Swinburne’s style without needing to mark specific passages.

Instead of underlining Swinburne’s purple passages, Wilde chose to place vertical lines throughout his copy of Essays and Studies, next to the author’s aphorisms and paradoxes. He marked Swinburne’s comment, apropos of Arnold, that “Some men are right without being reasonable, he is reasonable without being right”. A tick is also visible next to the remark that Byron had “much to fight against; and three impediments hung about him at starting, the least of which would have weighed down a less strong man: youth, and genius, and an ancient name.” Swinburne has never been regarded as an influence on Wilde the epigrammatist, but these markings strongly suggest that possibility.

The young Oxonian seems to have especially relished Swinburne’s maxims when they were illustrated with evocative images and metaphors. Swinburne’s phrase “Nothing that leaves us depressed is a true work of art. We must have light though it be lightning, and air though it be storm” has been marked, as has the following comment on the organic quality of Coleridge’s style: “Thus it has grown: not thus it has been carved”. Vivid aphoristic phrases such as these famously appear throughout Wilde’s later writings, and it is seems possible that Swinburne’s prose helped inspire this motif of his mature style.

Wilde was the most fastidious of readers (legend has it that he refused to read on whenever he came across the ugly word “magenta” in a book), so it is hardly surprising that he appears to have been offended (or perhaps amused) by the occasional excess and coarseness of Swinburne’s style. In his essay on Byron, Swinburne remarks that while “Coleridge and Keats used nature mainly as a stimulant or a sedative; Wordsworth [used it] as a vegetable fit to shred into his pot and pare down like the outer leaves of a lettuce for didactic and culinary purposes.” In the margin next to this phrase, Wilde has made two bold vertical lines and scribbled a large exclamation mark—which we may take to indicate distaste or amusement, or perhaps a combination of both.

Just as he had done while reading Symonds’s Studies, Wilde transcribed some lines from Essays and Studies into one of his undergraduate commonplace books. One entry there, titled “Beauty”, begins:

‘Rien n’est vrai que le beau’ [nothing is true except the beautiful]. Beauty may be strange, quaint, terrible, she may play with pain as with pleasure, handle a horror till she leaves it a delight. Art is one though the service of art is diverse. Beauty also may become incarnate in a myriad of diverse forms but the worship of beauty is simple and absolute.

Wilde was quoting from the penultimate and the ultimate pages of Essays and Studies. Swinburne had written “Rien n’est vrai que le beau [an Aesthetic slogan originally coined by Alfred de Musset]…Beauty may be strange, quaint, terrible, may play with pain as with pleasure, handle a horror till she leave it a delight.” Wilde copied these lines out with only one or two minor alterations (he added the word “she”, and wrote “leaves” instead of “leave”); his eye then skipped a few lines in Essays and Studies until it alighted on the phrase: “The worship of beauty, though beauty be itself transformed and incarnate in shapes diverse without end, must be simple and absolute”. This time Wilde was not content to simply transcribe the lines; rather he transformed them: “Beauty also may become incarnate in a myriad of diverse forms but the worship of beauty is simple and absolute.” Here we see the apprentice writer streamlining his source, rendering Swinburne’s phrase more lucid and memorable. The example, once again, evidences the extent of Wilde’s ambition as well as his skill.

So far as we know, Wilde never wrote an essay on (or in imitation of) Algernon Swinburne during his time at Magdalen. Nevertheless, the evidence of the markings in his copy of Essays and Studies, and in his notebooks, suggest Swinburne’s pervasive influence on the young author, an influence that would bear rich fruit in Wilde’s later critical writings.

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Wilde’s undergraduate encounters with Symonds and Swinburne at Magdalen were not only fruitful in the short term; they may also have served as a paradigm for his future practice as an author, convincing him (if he needed convincing) that imitation was the best way to proceed. Throughout his career, before embarking on a new work, Wilde always selected a literary model (or models) to follow. He used Hans Christian Anderson’s celebrated tales as exemplars for his own fairy stories; the plays of the “Belgian Shakespeare”, Maurice Maeterlinck, provided the prototype for his French-language drama Salome. In the course of writing his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde imitated exponents of countless genres such as the Gothic novel (i.e. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) and dandy literature (i.e. Benjamin Disraeli’s Vivian Grey), as well as several masters of different varieties of popular Victorian fiction such as the “magic picture novel” and the “mesmeric novel”.

Wilde would speak openly about his derivative method of composition. He declared that imitation, and admiration, were “the portal to all great things” in literature, and identified the 18th-century English poet Thomas Chatterton as his model of authorship. Chatterton composed, in the 1760s, pastiches, or “forgeries”, of medieval poetry, passing them off as the original work of the 15th-century monk Thomas Rowley. The poet had, as Wilde explained in his 1886 lecture on Chatterton, also effortlessly absorbed the language of his contemporaries: scribbling off, by the yard, “polished lines like Pope, satire like Churchill…[and emotive verse like] Gray, Collins, Macpherson”.

Wilde characterised Chatterton, the marvellous boy of English literature, as an author “of the type of Shakespeare and Homer: a dramatist [who] claimed for the artist freedom of mood.” The poet’s “forgeries” and imitations were motivated by “the desire for artistic self-effacement” rather than by creative sterility or kleptomania; to accuse him of literary petty larceny would, Wilde argued, be to confuse an aesthetical with an ethical question. The “forgeries” were inspired too, by the delight Chatterton took in playing with the poetic postures and styles of his literary precursors—a form of literary dressing up Wilde himself relished.

Imitation, Wilde would claim, had nothing to do with plagiarism or lack of originality, for no one could ever be truly original. Every writer was “the child of someone else”, insofar as he copied, consciously or otherwise, his predecessors. True originality, therefore, could, “be found rather in the use made of a model than in the rejection of all models”; and great poets were those capable of drawing new music from reeds that had been “touched by other lips”.

Inevitably, Wilde’s method would leave him open to the charges of plagiarism, an accusation that dogged him throughout his career. The line between mimicry and theft is an extremely fine one, and Wilde was not always careful about crossing it. Once again, he was perfectly candid about his peccadilloes: “It is only the unimaginative who ever invents;” he would say, “the true artist is known by what he annexes, and he annexes everything”. “Of course I plagiarise”, he confessed to a friend, “it is the privilege of the appreciative man. I never read Flaubert’s Tentation de St Antoine without signing my name at the end of it…All the Best Hundred Books bear my signature in this manner”.

With characteristic ingenuity Wilde would come up with a definition of plagiarism that would effectively absolve himself of the charge. Plagiarism, he declared, only ever really existed where the imitator failed to surpass his source in brilliance: “When I see a monstrous tulip with four wonderful petals in someone else’s garden”, he explained, “I am impelled to grow a monstrous tulip with five wonderful petals, but that is no reason why someone should grow a tulip with only three petals.”

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In the summer of 1878 Wilde achieved a first in his finals examination, thereby becoming one of only a handful of Magdalen men to achieve a “double first” in Greats in the entire 19th century. Despite his spectacular success in schools, however, he decided not to embrace the academic life. Fear of becoming “a dried up Oxford don” weighed heavily with him, as did his inordinate ambition to become “famous, and if not famous, notorious”. The development of a lush and epigrammatic aesthetic prose style—his newly-acquired skill in playing music on a “reed” that had been “touched” by the lips of Pater, Symonds, and Swinburne—was also a factor, for it was a manner that could serve him well as a lecturer and as a writer in the popular press. Sometime in 1879 or 1880, Wilde left Oxford for London, comparing the move to leaving “Parnassus for Piccadilly”.

Wilde carried with him to the English capital his impressive academic qualifications, along with numerous copies of his recently published poem “Ravenna” (with which he had carried off Oxford’s Newdigate poetry prize in 1878) and a trunk full of the manuscript leaves of countless other verses he had scribbled at Magdalen. And it was as a classicist and as a poet that he first attempted to make a name for himself in the English capital.

It would, however, be as a prose author that Wilde ultimately established his reputation. In 1882 he declared his genius in America, impressing large audiences with lectures on art in which he rehearsed the aesthetic credo of Pater, Symonds, and Swinburne (among others) and offered an elegant pastiche of their style. At the end of the 1880s he penned the platonic critical dialogues that would be published in Intentions (1891) as “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic as Artist”, in which he reprised, once again, the aesthetic style of his youthful models, mixing it this time with a wit and an intellectual range that were entirely his own. In 1890 the first version of his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray was issued in a magazine to critical consternation and outrage, which ensured that it would be a succès de scandale.

Wilde eventually passed from prose to drama (before passing on from drama to prison), achieving his greatest triumph, in 1895, with the enormously popular plays An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. Yet it was in prose that he first made his mark. The exercises in style he completed during his years at Magdalen, using authors such as Symonds and Swinburne as his models, consequently assume a great significance, and can be regarded as among the most productive seeds Wilde planted at Oxford. Those seeds would later blossom into some of the most strangely shaped and curiously coloured hothouse flowers of 19th-century literature.

Thomas Wright is the author of Oscar’s Books: A journey around the library of Oscar Wilde (Vintage, 2009) and of Death in Genoa, an audio drama about Wilde, which can be downloaded, free of charge, from The Independent.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Wilde scholar Tracey Carroll (Drew University, New Jersey) for her extremely helpful comments on an early draft of this article, and Don Mead, chairman of The Oscar Wilde Society (www.oscarwildesociety.co.uk), for his excellent advice. I would like to thank the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York for access to manuscript material, and Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, for his support and for permission to quote from material still in copyright.

Richard Greene
Edith Sitwell: Avant-Garde Poet, English Genius
Virago, 2011
544 Pages
£25
ISBN 978-1860499678

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The odd lazy and spiteful review is to be expected in the lifetime of any major writer. As biographer Richard Greene observes, most authors would regard occasional vilification as an occupational hazard. Not so Miss Edith Sitwell. In 1940, when journalist Hamilton Fyfe claimed that the Sitwell family had earned recognition that exceeded their combined artistic merit, Edith Sitwell and her brothers simply sued for libel. Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell each walked away with £350 and renewed media notoriety while Fyfe’s interest in the high-profile brood miraculously subsided. Needless to say, one embarks on a review of one of the 20th century’s feistiest literary lives with a certain degree of residual apprehension. Fortunately, Greene’s biography of Sitwell leaves little to inspire libellous critique, instead offering readers an energetic account that does justice to the modernist poet’s deliciously eccentric life.

In his preface, Greene writes that part of his biographical project is to rescue Sitwell’s reputation from a chilly contemporary climate of critical neglect. In Greene’s projected fantasy, the name Edith Sitwell would sit instinctively alongside Yeats, Eliot, Auden, and Woolf on any standard syllabus of modernist literature. In her lifetime (1887-1964), Sitwell enjoyed a reputation as one of Britain’s outstanding female poets, most famous for her vigorous, poignant meditation on the London Blitz, titled “Still Falls the Rain” (1940). Several critics, including C.S. Lewis, compared her work to Sappho’s, citing its “technical variety and imaginative depth”, a parallel that reveals something of Sitwell’s iconic status during the 20th century.

Sitwell’s career was a mixed bag of creative enterprise. Moments of pure poetic innovation were supplemented by prose projects that were necessary commercial drudgery. Despite growing up in a Derbyshire estate the size of a small county, peculiar family politics meant that Sitwell’s dynamic avant-garde lifestyle comprised debt as well as dactyls. Greene’s story of Sitwell depicts a woman both empowered and vulnerable, a woman who valued creativity and friendship above all while somehow retaining a snobbishness that rivals Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s.

Standing at over 6 feet tall and equipped with “aquiline”, jewel-encrusted hands, a homemade turban, and lashings of savage wit, Sitwell must have cut an extraordinary figure in salons across London and Europe. Elizabeth Bowen once described her as “a high altar on the move”. While many biographers scavenge archives for droll anecdotes and quips, it is clear that Sitwell’s papers (some only recently released) offered Greene a brimming file of ready-made amusement. The challenge of writing Sitwell’s biography was always going to be overcoming the seduction of pure quirkiness. Greene’s subject could have easily collapsed into an entertaining compilation of avant-garde conceits. Instead, he crafts a three-dimensional human being: a life story with depth as well as Sitwell’s often caricatured height.

Much of the biography’s success owes to Greene’s own authorial personality and the way he seems to converse with Sitwell, creating an intimate, tongue-in-cheek dynamic that errs toward charm rather than cheesiness. One imagines that Greene would have given Sitwell a run for her money over a few glasses of her (too) much-beloved champagne. While it may not be academically de rigueur to interact so informally with one’s biographical subject, the most discerning passages in the biography occur when Greene makes his own voice heard over the hubbub of literary tittle-tattle. He is like a dry, pragmatic avuncular figure, quietly shuffling Sitwell’s affairs into order and making shrewd observations without spoiling the fun. The biography’s humour treads a fine line between smirk-worthy wit and Dad jokes, but in all instances, it affords an endearing interlude in a genre that is so often prone to dryness. After narrating various accounts suggesting that the house that Sitwell was born in was haunted, Greene laments, “sadly, none of the ghosts has consented for an interview”.

Greene’s engagement with Sitwell’s biographical material does not confine itself to the odd ironic jibe. Since many of Sitwell’s nebulous anecdotes do not seem to match one another, Greene takes it upon himself to play detective and uncover the likeliest version of events. He quotes Sitwell’s story of how she met the painter Walter Sickert in 1904, when she was 17:

When Elsie took me to his studio, I was an unimaginably shy young girl. Elsie said to him, ‘This woman admires your La Vecchia’ (a picture being shown at that time in a London gallery). ‘Well, then, she must be a very intelligent woman, or else she is mad. Which one are you?’ ‘Mad’ I said. Enchanted by my answer, he gave me a drawing of the Bedford Music Hall.

After narrating Sitwell’s invariably elegant version of events, Greene offers his own refreshing scepticism. One gets the sense that with the wily Sitwell, conveniently clever episodes should never be swallowed without a pinch of scrutiny. In this instance, Greene points out that Sitwell’s dates do not correspond to Sickert’s sojourn in England. Greene quietly observes that a disproportionate number of Sitwell’s most charming stories happen when she is at the preferred age of 17. Furthermore, Greene notes that in later retellings, Sitwell “has Elsie say merely, ‘This woman admires your pictures’”, presumably having realised that La Vecchia was only exhibited in the summer of 1907. Greene’s precocious analytical sidesteps reveal Sitwell’s desire to manipulate her own public legacy, and perhaps more importantly, an anxiousness to remould her difficult childhood into something more enchanting than it really was. Greene appears to enjoy chasing Sitwell’s stories as if the biographer and his subject were playing one giant game of cat and mouse. And Sitwell is one frisky mouse.

Sitwell’s life story co-stars a host of 20th-century poetic powerhouses including Siegfried Sassoon and T.S. Eliot (or “Tom” as she casually calls him). Such a large and fascinating cast necessitates a biographical juggling act wherein each illustrious acquaintance must be accounted for from the moment they waltz into Sitwell’s pokey living room. Managing her crowded posse of literary upper-crusters is one of Greene’s strengths. He navigates the narrative of Sitwell’s rise to artistic infamy with finesse. It is the private Edith Sitwell who sometimes fades into the background: the eating, sleeping, letter-writing, turban-sewing, nail-filing Edith.

Despite arousing intrigue with the notion that Sitwell’s poetry was “choked by the circumstances of daily life”, Greene gives us very little about Sitwell’s quotidian habits and routines. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s classic biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), Gaskell treats us to a description of Brontë’s day-to-day domestic habits as they fit in with (or rather interrupted) her routine of writing.

…she would steal into the kitchen, and quietly carry off the bowl of vegetables…and breaking off in the full flow of interest and inspiration in her writing, carefully cut out the specks in the potatoes, and noiselessly carry them back to their place.

While Gaskell’s glowing account of Brontë’s domestic virtues may make a contemporary post-feminist reader grimace, she nevertheless provides an insightful and delightful glimpse into her subject’s lesser-known idiosyncrasies. One might suppose that Sitwell never used her ethereal hands to scrape a black eye off a potato, but she may well have contributed to her small, basic household in London. Even if a depiction of domestic minutiae struck Greene as superfluous or disrespectful, a detailed account of Sitwell’s writing process or daily schedule would have been a welcome aside. Although thorough research can only yield selective shards of a posthumous life, Greene’s apparent reluctance to inquire into Sitwell’s private tastes doubtless makes her a less accessible subject.

By the end of the biography it is easy to comprehend Greene’s enthusiasm for revivifying Sitwell’s legacy. Amid family dysfunction and industry fracases, Sitwell’s unapologetic intelligence shines through, as does her intense, thoughtful poetic voice and propensity for general mischief-making. Although receiving no formal education she ended her long life as “Dame Edith Sitwell D. Litt., D. Litt., D. Litt., D.Litt., D.Litt.” after earning five honorary doctorates, including one from Oxford in 1951. Never one to overrate humility, Sitwell gleefully brandished her new accolades at the “pipsqueakery”, as she derisively called her critics. With similar pride, Greene brandishes Sitwell’s genius at a new generation of readers. Whether or not Sitwell’s evocative rhythms and haunting imagery will ever regain popular lustre is uncertain, but if her work remains in the academic shadows, it will certainly be despite Greene’s animated biographical insights.

Kate Steinweg is reading for an MSt in English at Wolfson College, Oxford.

C.K. Williams
On Whitman
Princeton UP, 2010
208 Pages
£13.95
ISBN 978-0691144726

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It is an ominous sign when C.K. Williams, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and essayist, opens his “small book on Whitman” by relating that when he told a friend he was planning to write it, the friend answered, “What in heavens [sic] name is left to say?” There has indeed been much written on Whitman: Williams mentions, among others, Paul Zweig’s Walt Whitman: The Making of a Poet (1985) and David S. Reynolds’s Walt Whitman’s America (1996), both excellent and extensive studies. And regardless of a writer’s energy, the task of squeezing another volume (however tiny) onto such a crowded shelf is a necessarily daunting one. Williams counters his friend’s scepticism by contending that the motive behind his book on Whitman was to “clear the air…to try to reestablish and reconfirm the raw power of the poetry in the context it was making for itself on the page, not in the range of all that lay behind it”; in other words, to get back to the poetry itself, to rediscover the “sheer revelation, sheer wonder” of reading it.

A noble intention, but unfortunately Williams ends up validating his friend’s suspicions. One should not, as Updike says, “blame [the author] for not achieving what he did not attempt”, but Williams front-loads his book with promises he simply does not keep. At the beginning, at least, Williams seems to ask the right questions: “How could this come to pass? This stupendous, relentless surge of poetic music with its intricate and constantly surprising combinations of sound?” The answers to these questions might have formed a complex portrait not only of Whitman, but of Williams himself, a poet renowned for his Whitmanian long poetic line and personal candor. However, the unfortunate result of this academic detox, especially when performed in a tone of such false modesty and condescension, is irritating at best and embarrassing at worst. Even if the book did not claim to be a “personal reassessment” of Whitman’s poetry, a non-academic look at Leaves of Grass (1855)—along the lines of, say, Michael Wood on Nabokov—could have been illuminating.

But we never know where and when Williams’s personal impressions will assert themselves. He will disappear for chapters, and then, just as an objective critical tone seems to establish itself, he will resurface with an irrelevant aside: “Now one of those passages that, despite my deep disbelief in anything like eternal life, brings me thrillingly close to something like Wordsworth’s intimations of immortality”. If interjections like these had been woven and developed throughout, that would be one thing; but at this point, toward the end of the book, such a statement seems intrusive and oddly patronizing.

Some such remarks are downright obnoxious. After noting that “All along…Whitman did have Longfellow”, Williams cannot resist adding (in a footnote) that he “should probably mention that I had Longfellow, too.” To put it rather crudely, so what? By way of demonstrating the acuteness of this “having”, he then “recites” some Longfellow, exclaiming after this display of poetic retention, “My goodness, it’s still there” (presumably he did not have a copy of Longfellow to hand when he penned this passage). It seems we should thank our lucky stars that he has graciously bestowed upon us hoi polloi a guide to this overwhelmingly rich poetry.

And guide us he does, mostly by “introducing” long copied-out passages from Leaves of Grass with one-sentence paraphrases. Why not just direct us to open Leaves of Grass instead? Teeming it is; abstruse it is not. Rarely does a writer show too much and tell too little, but Williams somehow manages it. In his essay collection, Poetry and the Age (1953), Randall Jarrell writes that “to show Whitman for what he is one does not need to praise or explain or argue, one needs simply to quote.” It worked for Jarrell, but it only works once. Williams may be trying for his own exuberant Jarrellian homage, but one can only lament Whitman’s “reputation” among non-poetry-readers, in between overlong quotations, so much before it begins to sound redundant and more than a bit pompous.

And Williams began so well, with such admirable critical enthusiasm, reminding us that “it’s essential to keep in mind that in poetry the music comes first, before everything else, everything else: until the poem has found its music, it’s merely verbal matter, information.” This seems broadly true, and is one of the smallest flickers of a compelling meditation on the music of not only Whitman’s poetry, but poetry in general. But Williams soon extinguishes these flickers by arguing that “because the evidence [surrounding Whitman’s life and literary production] is so meager, there’s a point at which we have to have recourse to the notion of ‘genius’.” This a dubious claim even by non-specialist standards, and, even worse, it immediately thwarts the complexity and contradiction—something Whitman knew a thing or two about—engendered by humble, genuine inquiry. The abandonment of such inquiry implies that the reader, regardless of whether or not he or she is encountering Whitman’s poetry for the first time, is too dense to understand even its basic subject matter.

On top of all this, some of Williams’s reasoning, however unacademic and personal, is downright faulty: in one of the footnotes scattered throughout the book, he determines that “Song of Myself” directly, if ironically, influenced Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” because both poems have songs in the title and involve an “I” and a “you” (a more likely candidate for this distinction is Kipling’s “The Love Song of Har Dyal”). Williams seems to delight in his position as a critical maverick, going so far as to call Eliot a “bloviating…liar” (he generously “hopes” these lies are “unconscious”) for daring to besmirch Whitman’s divine and mysterious genius. In the next breath, he links Four Quartets (1944) with Whitman’s lyric meditation “To Think of Time” while ignoring the differences between secular and religious spiritualism. This is not to deny the link between Whitman and Eliot; Harold Bloom, for instance, has made the Whitman-Eliot connection (Eliot’s lilac-breeding cruel April has its roots in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”), which here goes unreferenced. It would have been more interesting for Williams to ask what Eliot noticed and was responding to when he says that “Whitman’s style is of [an] excrescent, abortive kind”, and to explore how Whitman’s American transcendentalist-inspired spirituality has been transmuted by modernism. But by this point we know what not to expect from this book.

In all, Williams’s pseudo-reading-journal sounds like nothing so much as a rather enthusiastic book report written by a pretentious undergraduate. From such promisingly complex beginnings emerges a hackneyed list of topics Williams has identified as important to this colossus. Whitman writes about America: check. Whitman writes about women: check. Transcendentalism: check. Likely bisexuality: a timid check, posing as political correctness. Relationship to Baudelaire, Hugo, Longfellow, Eliot, Pound: here we are offered a tortuous argument about influence eventually discarded for the unsinkable genius-in-a-divine-vacuum conclusion. If this book is, indeed, a personal reintroduction to Whitman, why not take us on your journey with him instead of treading, heavily, these well-worn paths? Or better yet, include a voucher good for one copy of Leaves of Grass.

Rachel Abramowitz is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at Christ Church, Oxford.

Stephen Fry
The Fry Chronicles: an autobiography
Penguin, 2010
438 Pages
£20.00
ISBN 978-0718154837

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Stephen Fry’s latest memoir—documenting his life between his acceptance at Cambridge and his ascension to the English comedic hierarchy—has received a fair amount of censorious press since its release five months ago. If a kind of anti-Fry movement has emerged, its main representatives deride Fry as the dim man’s clever man, and judge his latest book to be transparently self-celebratory, little more than a collection of pleasant chit-chat. The Fry Chronicles does contain a lot of pleasant chat. We learn about Fry’s boyhood addiction to sugar (“C12H22011…[that] beguiling and benighted substance”), and with moderate sympathy, we offer him a consolatory pat on the back. We are told of Fry’s extravagant and romantic sojourns, and of truanting excursions from the Norfolk College of Arts and Technology to the American Bar of the Ritz Hotel (to which he found himself drawn, “like Dr Watson…drawn to Piccadilly”).

But behind the cocktail and Sobranie-filled hours of amiable chat which The Fry Chronicles jovially and apologetically delivers, there lies what appears to be its author’s main purpose: that of erecting an “indestructible shell of personality around himself”, to borrow Simon Callow’s pithy description of Fry. This book is not an “explanation of extraordinary behaviour”, as Wilde said of his De Profundis (1897), but simply the chronicling of a series of extraordinary events that have shaped an extraordinary character. While De Profundis was the last thing Wilde wrote, as Fry’s concluding paragraph notes, he himself has more “for another book”, and far more time in which to write it. Fry has not yet reached the stage of Wildean explanation; his concern continues to be the creation of a legend.

The Fry Chronicles is split into three main sections, each beginning with “C”. The first is a compendium of addictions and misdemeanours, tracing Fry’s toils with Cereal, Candy, Cigarettes and Cessation. The section is somewhat indulgent; at times the reader may feel as though he’s sitting patiently while Fry lists with guilty glee the kitsch names of his favourite sweets. But thankfully, some Hollywood name-dropping (Lindsay Lohan and Peter Jackson are both afforded cameos), a fantastic Tom Stoppard vignette, and a good deal of charming, alliterative prose entertainingly carries us to the book’s second section.

The “College to Colleague” section introduces the book’s pivotal location, a place that turns out to be essential to the constitution of both the work and its subject. That setting is Cambridge. As with Virginia Woolf’s novel Jacob’s Room (1922) or Richard Ellmann’s biography of Wilde (1989), Cambridge (or Oxford in the latter case) is acknowledged as a place liable to define an entire life, and Fry, in search of definition, treats his alma mater as he does himself: he transforms it into an ideal, a legend. Initially, his defence of Oxford and Cambridge, with its vaguely paranoid tone, resembles his defence of himself:

It is natural for people to despise the very idea of Oxford and Cambridge. Elitist, snobbish…Oxbridge doesn’t fool anybody with all that flannel about “meritocracy” and “excellence”. Are we supposed to be impressed by the silly names they give themselves? Fellows and stewards and deans and dons and proctors and praelectors. And as for the students, or undergraduates, I beg their pompous pardons…

Ultimately, however, it is quite clear whose side this former Cambridge undergraduate is on. In the succeeding paragraph he argues that honesty and sensitivity should be looked for in those who initially appear “attitudinizing and posturing in every gesture”. According to Fry treating these students with instant contempt only strengthens the shield which may hide those “pitiful posers” who are in fact “shrinking and shrivelling like salted snails” on the inside.

This desire for honest, sensitive human relations is the essence of the young Fry’s idealisation of Cambridge. He recalls that before arriving at university, he

believed in [Cambridge] completely…I hero-worshipped E.M. Forster and G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles and their associated Bloomsbury satellites Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and Lytton Strachey as well as the more illustrious planets in that system, Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes and Ludwig Wittgenstein. I admired especially the cult of personal relations that Forster espoused. His view that friendship, warmth and honesty between people mattered more than any cause or any system was for me a practical as well as a romantic ideal.

Fry’s Cambridge came to embody this ideal. He seems to have swallowed whole Forster’s comments on the virtues of university life in Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1934):

Body and spirit, reason and emotion, work and play, architecture and scenery, laughter and seriousness, life and art – these pairs which are elsewhere contrasted are there fused into one. People and books reinforced one another, intelligence joined hands with affection, speculation became a passion, and discussion was made profound by love.

Fry assures us, “I know how insufferably awful I must appear when I tell you that I wanted to go to Cambridge because of the Bloomsbury Group”. But in fact, it is hard to believe Fry is indeed aware of this. One suspects he simply predicts that a number of readers will interpret his motives as “appallingly precious”—and he wouldn’t want to be pipped to that post. Overall, it is clear that Fry maintains to this day his unapologetic belief in the Cambridge of Bloomsbury and the Apostles. His juvenile ideas of Cambridge are related with a fondness which does not snigger or patronise, and that ultimately comes across as honest and completely worthy. Fry’s assertion that it was the “intellectual and the ethical tradition that appealed to [his] puritanical and self-righteous soul” is likely to seem antiquated and alien to all but a few present-day Oxbridge applicants. But for Fry, it is the core of an ideal that remains long after his association with the university has ended, part of an entire programme for living. This ideal is evoked in a lyrical metaphor form Woolf’s Jacob’s Room:

…if at night, far out at sea over the tumbling waves, one saw a haze on the waters, a city illuminated, a whiteness even in the sky, such as that now over the Hall of Trinity where they’re still dining, or washing up plates, that would be the light burning there – the light of Cambridge.

After the poetic profundity of The Fry Chronicles’s second section, it is difficult to muster much enthusiasm for the third. The “C” this time stands for Comedy, and the narrative is little more than a list of Fry’s excellent showbiz achievements (though the writing does retain its characteristic verbosity). Phone conversations with Stephen Sondheim and mounting commissions for more and more shows are related without the starry-eyed wonder evident in the Cambridge sections. Where the second section is paradoxical and exploratory, and provides contrasting representations of the author, the third offers a prosaic, step-by-step guide to Fry’s activities after his departure from university. Whether he is describing himself as a “twat in tweed”, a “punchably pompous buttoned-up arse-hole”, or “hopeful and daft” and genuinely quite scared, in these late stages Fry seems intent on removing the romantic lustre from a tale of incandescent success while polishing its artificial sheen with the other hand. But the failure of this last section matters very little, because we have already glimpsed something much more substantive than a mere list of facts. Oscar Wilde said, “You must never destroy legends. Through them we are given an inkling of the true physiognomy of a man.” The Fry Chronicles exists not to explain, nor to delve aggressively into its author’s character. This book exists primarily to add to the legend of Oxbridge and to the legend of Stephen Fry.

Luke Maxted is reading for a BA in English Language and Literature at St Hilda’s College, Oxford.

Saul Bellow
Letters
Edited by Benjamin Taylor
Viking, 2010
608 Pages
£35.00
ISBN 978-0670022212

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When approaching a novelist’s letters, one is confronted with a form which exists somewhere between fiction and autobiography, the poetic and the practical, the work and the life. Some of the bare facts will be there; some of the artifice, too. Saul Bellow once said that “Fiction is the higher autobiography”, and indeed he was able to write Dangling Man (1944) because he knew what it was to dangle, to be a disillusioned Jew waiting in Chicago for the US army to draft him. Yet Bellow’s inference is close to Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s observation that “a poet’s autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is a footnote.” While the memoir is perhaps the most direct account of a life, it is rarely the most intimate, honest, or entertaining. What we hope for in Bellow’s letters is that some of that artistic distance is applied to his correspondences; that we may see the great stylist of 20th-century literature project the details of his life with that same imagination which gave life to Moses Herzog and Augie March. It is therefore a relief to find, in the very first letter, sentences such as:

I take this opportunity…to tell you…something, Yetta, that more through uncertainty and cowardice than anything else I have not been able to broach to you. True, I am a self-confessed coward. Cowards we are all intrinsically, but the justification of cowardice lies in the confession.

Bellow, at the time he wrote this, was 17.

Bellow was born in Lachine, Canada, and raised in Montreal before moving illegally to Chicago, the city he later described in To Jerusalem and Back (1976) as “huge, filthy, brilliant, and mean”. How he came by this impression, or the powers with which to express it so cogently, can only be guessed from the letters. Here a significant divergence from the novelistic and autobiographical forms should be noted. With its private jokes and its episodic and omissive tendencies, epistolary writing often gives little away except to those for whom the sentences were originally meant. It is in this genre of eavesdropping that the general reader, particularly the biographical detective, is often left feeling entirely unattended. There are clues to Bellow’s makeup, however. His school friends:

were reading buckrambound books from the public library and were in a state of enthusiasm, having found themselves on the shore of a novelistic land to which they really belonged, discovering their birthright, hearing incredible news from the great world of culture, talking to one another about the mind, society, art, religion, epistemology, and doing all this in Chicago.

It is with this spirit—inclusive, adventurous, distinctly American—that Bellow enrolled at the University of Chicago, only to move to Northwestern University when his father could no longer afford tuition fees at the former. His 20s were characteristically turbulent, uncertain, full of dead ends: a decade which saw him abandon graduate study as well as two novels. Having struggled to place a short story in a reputable magazine, he writes in 1942 that “somehow I have not clicked with editors.”

This “somehow” gives us an early hint of Bellow’s writerly gene. It wasn’t that he expected publication, but that he viewed his talent somewhat paradoxically; a rave-reviewing angel on his right shoulder and a disparaging devil on his left. Bellow judged his early story “Juif!” to be “immeasurably above” an earlier work, “The Dead James”, while he felt “miles and centuries away from The Very Dark Tress—whole developmental heights”, even while it was being considered for publication. He wonders in a letter to a friend whether he is “too demanding and exacting” to have berated himself over the state of his fledgling work, yet after consideration he decides: “I still feel that I was right.”

Feeling right about his wrongs put Bellow in esteemed company from a young age. He follows Tolstoy and Chekhov not simply because one can detect a Russian lineage in his work, but that he too possessed their impulse for self-degradation. At 27 he writes, “I have known one hundred sixty-nine brands of humiliation.” Thirty years later, having won three National Book Awards, Bellow was still counting the brands: “What does distress me is the thought that I may have made a mess where others (never myself) see praiseworthy achievements.”

His “demanding and exacting” eye, however, was not always turned inwards. Bellow was never too shy to tell a writer, publisher, or friend what he thought, even when what he thought was that his schoolmate Oscar Tarcov was “weak” and “childishly feeble”, or that one edition of Story magazine was “full of a coarse-grained piece of shit…a fictional version of the life of Robert Burns with lumps of half-digested haggis in it.” He reserved his prickliest words for reviewers—who wouldn’t?—taking aim at The New Yorker as well as its sister publication, the journal he calls “The New York Review of Each Other’s Books”. But that’s nothing compared to what he writes to his English publisher:

If you can find nothing better to say upon reading Augie March than that you all “think very highly” of me, I don’t think I want you to publish it at all. I’m not selling you a commodity. Your attitude infuriates me. Either you are entirely lacking in taste and judgement or you are being terribly prudent about the advance.

Bellow’s comic derision of anything he found lacking in vitality—not least the literature of his day, a canon he saw as “for the most part phony, or empty-hearted, banal and bungling”—can perhaps only be rivaled by the curmudgeonliness of his contemporary, Kingsley Amis, a man whose fatherly duties passed to Bellow in 1955. Following Amis’s death, his son, the novelist Martin Amis, looked to the man he once described as “the greatest American author ever” for paternal support. Bellow replied that he would “willingly take up the slack as a sort of adoptive father.” Indeed, despite claiming that he “never enjoyed writing letters”, it seems that Bellow was a guardian to many hearts throughout seven decades of correspondences.

In touching letters to Philip Roth, Allan Bloom, and Susan Glassman (his third wife), Bellow airs his affections with the same vitalising honesty with which he vents his grievances. He addresses life (seemingly all life, without ever losing sight of his own) with an acute rawness, a sincerity in which one can detect the great pulse of The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Seize the Day (1956), and Herzog (1964). To Martin Amis he writes:

I understand your saying that you are your dad. With a fair degree of accuracy I can see this in my own father. He and I never seemed to be in rapport: Our basic assumptions were very different. But now that looks superficial. I treat my sons much as he treated me: out of breath with impatience, and then a long inhalation of affection.

Bellow commits his powers of articulation to unburdening the great weight of human feeling with which he was simultaneously cursed and blessed throughout his life. One sees the truth in Amis’s facetious remark: “Bellow’s first name is a typo: that ‘a’ should be an ‘o’.” It is not right to say that under his rawness was a gentle heart, but that his heart—raw, gentle, unreserved—remained dedicated to comprehending itself in all its forms.

Presented with the one-way traffic of his outgoing mail, we keep company with the ghost of a writer whose great talent and affections are occupied in some other plain—a past of literary deals, bar mitzvahs, and funerals to which we were never invited. We intercept the frequencies of ex-wives and old friends and must translate them as best we can. Once private, now public: the letters of writers are paradoxical sources, and while Bellow’s are crafted with the same raging consciousness which drew his novels, anything approaching an autobiography remains illusive. His books continue to penetrate the human spirit more than any other of the last 50 years, yet the man appears to be, like the great American novel itself, seemingly ungraspable. In his own words: “I can never be picked up or put down.”

Paul Sweeten graduated in 2010 with an MSt in Creative Writing from Kellogg College, Oxford. Paul is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

“There are no second acts in American life”, Scott Fitzgerald once wrote: surely one of the most asinine statements on record. For if America is about anything it is about repeated acts of personal re-invention. None exemplify this more than John Cheever and Raymond Carver; each of whom, in and through their troubled and ultimately triumphant lives, bore a body of work sorely underappreciated in our own time.

At first sight Cheever and Carver could not seem more different: Carver, a shambling bear of a man from the saw-mill towns of the Northwest who struggled all his life to break into the Eastern literary establishment; Cheever the neat scion of a New England family, sleek laureate of the swimming pool-plotted suburbs of Connecticut and denizen in what John Updike called “the delicious glossy space” of the New Yorker.

Look deeper, though, and a similar, very American pattern emerges. Casualties of their parents’ pursuit of the American Dream, both Carver and Cheever started out as rootless misfits driven by dreams of making it, not just in literary but material terms; both were what Saul Bellow called “self-transformers” who improvised their lives, restlessly reaching out for fame, money, and a new sense of connection and community.

“A real mama’s boy” as one acquaintance described him, scruffy and dingy, unhandy and unlucky, Raymond Carver appeared the archetypical underdog. But there was always something detached and divided about him: he was both victim and observer of his own defeats. Throughout his life he spoke about there being “two Rays”, and Sklenicka captures well his inherent “doubleness”. And it perhaps served him well in his ambition, formed early on out of nowhere, to be a writer. People often described his life as a battle and Carver as the war correspondent who reported it. “He could not take care of himself. That’s how he survived”, a friend once said. Carver’s chief carer turned out to be a clever, competent small-town girl called Maryann, whom he married and who worked selflessly for years to support his literary ambitions. “Partners in the getaway”, Raymond and Maryann, like many before and since, headed for California to build a new life.

The dream did not come easy. Life became—between the odd grant and scholarship—a round of dead-end jobs, endless treks between anonymous apartments in beat-up cars, kids squalling on the back-seat, and Maryann waitressing at every truck-stop to keep them on the road. Children came all too soon but not the money or the inclination to nurture them. Drink provided a solution—and then the problem. Carver drank in part to soften the edges of a hard life, in part simply to deaden his sensitivities. He descended into a spiral of alcohol, violence, and guilt, followed by more alcohol. Like his parents’, Carver’s marriage eventually did not so much break up as unravel. The family, said his daughter, simply “disbanded”.

If Carver came from the margins of American society, Cheever claimed connections with its historic roots. “Always remember you are a Cheevah“, Cheever’s father told him, and throughout his life he delighted in tracing his lineage back through various New England luminaries. In reality Cheever’s origins were nowhere near as grand as he made out. His father was a shoe salesman, who fell early victim to the Depression. Personal disintegration and marital discord followed, with Cheever at one point summoned to an amusement park in order to talk his father down from the top of the roller-coaster from which he was noisily threatening to throw himself.

Distancing himself from the family wreckage, Cheever drifted, living for a time in a New York hovel so wretched that the famous Depression-era photographer Walker Evans used it as an icon of urban squalor. Saved by a talent for turning out short stories, especially the slight, smart social vignettes that appealed to the recently launched New Yorker, Cheever successfully put together a new life, adopting a strange, strangulated British-Bostonian accent, toughening his physique by a regime of sport, swimming, and chopping logs, and eventually marrying into the wealthy Whitney family and to all appearances becoming the model husband and father. But under the surface of the successful suburban paterfamilias, all was not well. “I came from nowhere and I don’t know where I’m going”, he wrote in his private journal. But for Cheever the grimmest skeleton in his Connecticut closet was what he termed his “sexual iridescence”—his bisexuality.

Always a heavy social drinker, Cheever, like Carver, joined that heroic American band of literary drinkers and substance abusers that stretches from Mailer back through Fitzgerald and London as far as Poe. Other countries have their boozing authors but there is something epic about American literary drunks. It is as if the land’s sheer scale and the mismatch between the overarching ambitions of its writers and their social marginality creates an emptiness and terror that can only be assuaged by Ahab-like voyages on the deepest seas of drink.

Then, astonishingly and against all odds, both men embarked on final journeys of reinvention. Cheever took his last drink in 1975, Carver two years later. “All I ever wanted”, Cheever had earlier written, “was to be rich, famous and loved”, and he at last got his wishes. Despite crippling attacks of depersonalisation from his years of drinking, he finished his masterpiece, Falconer, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1979. Finally honestly confronting his sexuality, he reached out, with some belated success, to his family, and became until his death in 1982 a much respected figure on the literary scene.

Carver, too, achieved at last the stability for which he had always yearned, after settling down with a new partner, the poet Tess Gallagher. “Now for the other life”, he wrote, “the one without mistakes.” Thanks to film script sales and a munificent Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters he was able to enjoy the material fruits of success, including a Mercedes, a yacht, and a big house in the country—in all of which he took enormous childish pride. More importantly, it was during this period that he wrote the bulk of his work, seeing several important collections emerge into print before his death in 1988.

The overriding theme of Carver’s stories is isolation—but an isolation shot through with unexpected, epiphanic moments of connection and inter-subjectivity. The second acts captured in his stories are brief, compressed moments of communion. There is no Whitmanesque embraced multitude, no Beat-like cosmic orgasm. Think, rather, of the sudden flare of a Zippo lighter illuminating two faces over a shared cigarette in a deserted bar or on a cold park bench. In their lonely desolation Carver’s stories are the literary equivalents of Edward Hopper’s famous picture, Night Hawks.

If Carver has been variously described—with only partial accuracy—as a minimalist or “a dirty realist”, Cheever was pigeon-holed as the New Yorker’s in-house chronicler of the American suburbs. But, as Updike wrote after Cheever’s death: “He was often labelled a writer about suburbia; but many people have written about suburbia, and only Cheever was able to make an archetypal place out of it, a terrain we can recognise within ourselves, wherever we are or have been.”

At their best Cheever’s stories provide, in Updike’s words, “a lesson in the dark gulf between outward appearance and inward condition”. Cheever—a man who repeatedly said “I can’t connect my life”—found in the suburbs and in his stories of “untidy lives lived in tidy households”—a mirror for his own conflicts. Himself the supreme self improviser, Cheever described the affluent 1950s suburbs as “an improvised way of life” with their formal-informal round of poolside rituals, private infidelities, neurotic insecurities, and constant, uncertain jockeying for status—a territory, incidentally, which has been more recently evoked in the current TV hit series Mad Men, which traces the conflicted lives of Madison Avenue admen in the early 1960s.

When Cheever died in 1982 he was at the height of his fame, widely read and loaded with honours. Since then the reputations of the two writers have, if anything, see-sawed in respect of one another. Few read Cheever today, and his stories command little academic attention; Carver’s critical standing has grown but still remains modest. Neither writer, it might be added, has ever had a significant impact in the United Kingdom. Let us hope that their legacies, like their lives, will in time enjoy their own triumphant—and deserved—second act.

Peter Snow read English at University College, Oxford and is currently a freelance writer living in Oxford.