Sidetracks. Richard Holmes
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offence. The other stories sound a bit like ingenious apocrypha. He was seen in a tavern drinking Shakespeare’s health in bad wine; he was seen in St Pancras churchyard reading the epitaphs; he was seen at the Brooke Street’s bakers being refused bread on tick.
Yet there is a grim and miraculous concordance between these final marginalia of his outward life, and the last and loveliest of Rowley’s visitations, ‘The Excelente Balade of Charitie’. In thirteen vivid and melodic stanzas, it tells of a poor ‘hapless pilgrim’ who has fallen on bad times and is now sick, poverty-stricken and destitute, his clothes threadbare and his body ravaged. He stands alone in a wide unlocated landscape, with a dark ponderous storm moving over the horizon towards him. ‘He had no housen theere, ne any convent nie.’ He shelters under a holm-oak. The storm breaks.
Liste! now the thunder’s rattling clymmynge sound
Cheves slowlie on, and then embollen clangs
Shakes the hie spyre, and losst, dispended, drown’d,
Still on the gallard eare of terrour hanges;
The windes are up; the lofty elmen swanges,
Agayn the levynne and the thunder poures,
And the full clouds are braste attenes in stonen showers.
By using the Rowley dialect and spelling with a wild freedom he had never before achieved, Chatterton here brings off one of the finest pieces of onomatopoeic poetry in the whole of English verse. It is quite unnecessary to know semantically what ‘clymmynge’ or ‘swangen’ mean; the sound, even the very look of the words tell you exactly what is happening, the power and terror of the storm.
The portrait of the pilgrim as he huddles under the oak is superb. It glows with a kind of transcendental pity for all men who are outcast or broken. It is almost as if Rowley were describing Chatterton in a vision of his own; as if the roles had been reversed:
Look in his glommed face: his sprighte there scanne;
Howe woe-be-gone, howe withered, forwynd, deade!
Haste to thy church-glebe-house, ashrewd manne!
Haste to thy kiste, thy only dortoure bedde.
Cold, as the clay which will gre on thy hedde,
Is Charitie and Love among high elves:
Knightis and Barons live for pleasure and themselves.
[A few words are difficult here, but not very: ‘forwynd’ means sapless; ‘ashrewd’ means cursed by fortune; ‘kiste’ is a coffin; and ‘dortoure’ is obviously a dormitory or bedroom.]
A figure now appears through the blasting storm, ‘spurreynge his palfry oer the watery plain’. It is an Abbott, and he is described with Chaucerian accuracy and judgement: ‘His cope was all of Lincoln clothe so fine, with a gold button fastened neere his chynne’, and his horse’s head has been plaited with roses. The pilgrim begs for aid, the Abbott – with the solemn inevitability of the medieval ballad – rudely refuses him. (‘Varlet, replied the Abbatte, cease your dinne; This is no season almes and prayers to give; My porter never lets a faitour [tramp] in.’) And he spurs away.
The storm breaks out with renewed ferocity. But through the downpour ‘faste reyneynge oer the plain a priest was seen’. This man is a poor friar, ‘Ne dighte full proude, ne buttoned up in golde; His cope and jape [gown] were gray, and eke were clene’. The pilgrim begs for alms; the friar immediately produces a silver groat from his pouch. ‘The mister pilgrim did for halline [joy] shake.’ Then with a marvellous unexpected gesture of generosity, the friar gives his cloak to the pilgrim. ‘Here take my semicope, thou arte bare I see; Tis thyne, the Seynctes will give me my reward.’ He disappears into the rain.
It is difficult to get out of one’s head the impression that Chatterton is in some primary symbolic sense that ‘unhailie pilgrim’; and the friar in grey who appears out of the storm and so freely gives aid is Thomas Rowley. Perhaps it makes no sense. But in this last known work, maybe precisely because it is the last known work, the figures move through the simple heraldic ritual of charity with a power much greater than their own individual humanity. The storm against them is all storms; it is the storm of circumstance, the storm of the mind, the storm of the body; it is the storm of passion, of creativity, of ambition, of loneliness. But there is no final despair; help comes, life is made out. There is no despair at Pyle Street, or at Colston Hall, or at Lambert’s drudging office; there is no despair at Shoreditch, or at Brooke Street in the attic.
Above all, the poet did not despair in the attic.
SO CHATTERTON gallantly passed me on to Shelley. For four years I was immersed in the travelling, dreaming and writing of his biography (as I have recounted in Footsteps). But once I had finished, or at least survived the book, every instinct told me to get away from London. I took the ferry to Calais in the winter of 1974. I remained in France on and off for two years, writing articles and reviews in a little attic room in the ninth arrondissement of Paris, at 9 rue Condorcet (not far from the boulevard Montmartre and the Marché Cadet) which is glimpsed in various disguises in the pieces of this section. I would walk down at night, in those pre-fax days, to mail my articles express (the magic dark blue sticker) back to London from the all-night Bureau de Poste near the Bourse. I was still lonely here, but I got to know Paris, the Île de France, and Normandy, and had my own romantic adventures which I now think left their shadow, or perfume, on these pieces.
But what I was looking for was the next subject, something which would take me directly into the heart of French Romanticism, among a later and very different group of artists and writers. Within a few months, I thought I had found it. What I had discovered was the great portrait collection of the nineteenth-century French photographer, Felix Nadar, in the Bibliothèque Nationale, which was then in the rue Richelieu, with its old pen-umbrous reading-room lit by green glass reading lamps at each desk. As I imply in this first piece, it seemed that Nadar would provide a wonderful opportunity for a biographic ensemble, the study of a whole Romantic generation, something extraverted and flashlit, full of melodrama and gaiety and humour.
But quite unexpectedly, my researches drew me in another direction. I came across a series of striking studio portraits of two literary colleagues, the journalist Théophile Gautier and the poet Gérard de Nerval. These men had been friends since childhood, attending the Lycée Charlemagne together in the boulevard Saint-Antoine in the 1820s, growing up as youthful disciples of Victor Hugo, and both making brilliant but very different careers in the Paris of Louis-Philippe, the 1848 insurrection, and the Second Empire. Outwardly, Gautier’s career was a triumph, ending as one of the great established Parisian men of letters: a poet, a highly paid columnist in the newspaper La Presse, an intimate of Flaubert, and patron to Baudelaire who dedicated Les Fleurs du Mal to him.
But Nerval’s life appeared to be a disaster, increasingly rootless and poverty-stricken, ending in a series of internments in an asylum in Passy and eventual suicide in an alley leading down to the river Seine. The stark contrast in their destinies seemed to me to tell an essential story about Romanticism. So I felt my way along the interwoven paths of their biographies, beginning with a first journalistic sketch of Gautier, like a mirror image, visiting London. I then assembled and translated a collection of his autobiographical fantasy tales, My Fantoms, and out of this collection arose the story of ‘Poor Pierrot’. Here was a haunting mythical figure from the Commedia dell’ Arte, who came literally to life in the career of the mime artist Deburau. This Pierrot’s biography had a sadness and sudden violence which foreshadowed Nerval’s.
But when I came directly to Nerval himself, I found the path of traditional biography blocked, for the reasons I have explained in Footsteps. I wrote a 400-page biography of the two