George Levine is a professor of English at Rutgers University. His most recent book is The Realistic Imagination.
A review of With Friends Possessed: A Life of Edward FitzGerald. By Robert Bernard Martin. Illustrated. 313 pp. New York: Atheneum. $17.95.
``THE COLLECTED WORKS OF EDWARD FITZGERALD'' fills seven small volumes - barely. The last volume is half index. The first three print different editions of the famous ``Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,'' of an earlier translation from the Persian, ``Salaman and Absal,'' and of an odd ``dialogue on youth,'' ``Euphranor.'' The other volumes are largely given to free translations of Calderon, of ``Agamemnon'' and of various fragments. As Edmund Gosse, introducing the ``Collected Works,'' put it, ``There is, at first sight, so little to be enthusiastic about, the actual out-put is so exiguous, the `Works' - in comparison with those, let us say, of Tennyson or the Brownings - so like a small wild aster tied alongside with roses and camellias.'' The scent of admiring decadence is in Gosse's prose, but we might yet well ask, ``And at second sight?''
FitzGerald belies our conventional sense of Victorian writers as puritanically obsessed overachievers, producing, like Ruskin, enough for 39 enormous volumes in a collected edition or, like Carlyle, 30 volumes in praise of silence. But FitzGerald was, to be only a little unfair, rich, rather lazy, unambitious, without reforming moral energy. His life may be taken to ask the question, What should a young man from a rich family, well educated, free of responsibility and with no clear sexual inclination, do with himself? It is not a burning question. Only the remarkable success of the ``Rubaiyat'' has led several generations of scholars to ask it. Only the ``Rubaiyat'' and the wonderful four volumes of personal letters - which we begin to be interested in because of the ``Rubaiyat'' but end by valuing above that famous poem - require serious attention.
For FitzGerald's life was, as Robert Bernard Martin emphasizes in his fine and economically written biography, a history of remarkable friendships. In place of work, moral dedication, marriage, perhaps sexuality itself, FitzGerald devoted himself to friendships. He knew and was loved by almost everybody who was anybody. Thackeray and Tennyson (and his brother, Frederick) were friends from his youth. Fanny Kemble, the famous actress, sustained a wonderful correspondence with him in the last decade or so of his life. Even Carlyle, who liked almost nobody - not even Carlyle - liked him (and exploited him a bit for scholarly purposes). But FitzGerald's taste in friends was catholic, as long as they were male. Class and nonintellectual predilections were no barrier, so the man he most loved was an athletic young squire, William Kenworthy Browne, who died after falling from a horse while trying to rebuke another rider. And he even grew very close to a herring fisherman, Posh Fletcher, whom he staked to a fishing boat, the Meum and Tuum.
FitzGerald was not a great writer, despite the continuing charms of the ''Rubaiyat,'' which now seems something of a period piece, an evocation of attitudes to be developed more intensively by Swinburne and other fin de si ecle poets. But he wrote at least 4,000 letters, full not only of gossip but of life and of art, music and literature, subjects in which he was deeply learned.
Finally, however, these letters - the primary though not the exclusive source of ``With Friends Possessed'' - evoke a complex, talented, ultimately rather sad man, whom Mr. Martin tries to redeem from his reputation, long established in the world of belles- lettres, as ``Old Fitz.'' The conception of Old Fitz is, Mr. Martin says, ``the easiest way of dealing with him,'' that is, to see him as ``a delightful, learned, and eccentric recluse in funny clothes.'' Mr. Martin wants to show that this was mere caricature, condescending ``in its refusal to recognize the complications of his nature.''
Mr. Martin, the author of ``Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart,'' has here written a biography with something of the quality of its subject. It is delicately structured; its prose is lucid and unpretentious and understated, if persistently and self-consciously literary. And it is graceful. The first chapter is a splendidly economical and artful evocation of FitzGerald by way of his gravestone, which reads, ``It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves.'' Mr. Martin subtly undercuts the piety, as he implies FitzGerald wanted it undercut, by the pagan impiety of its fatalistic equivalent in the ``Rubaiyat'': ``We are helpless - thou hast made us what we are.''
The complications of FitzGerald's character, Mr. Martin demonstrates, are partly reflected in this suggestion of sly deception. But the essential argument, never fully stated, of this wonderfully uncluttered biography is that FitzGerald was a lonely, almost desperate figure, pleading in comically disguised ways for love from those friends he accumulated during his pastoral Cambridge University days and his days of roaming the beaches in search of sailors. In the midst of his most joyous times, he already feared the loss of them, yet in curious, perhaps self-protective ways, he encouraged the loss of all those who loved him and whom he loved. He almost never visited them. He lived in a way that made it difficult for them to visit him. He criticized them (and loaned them large sums of money).
And he struggled to hold on - first to Cambridge; then to Browne, who in FitzGerald's eyes compromised himself by marrying and caring for wealth; then to Edward Cowell, who introduced him to Persian and Omar Khayyam but married a woman FitzGerald himself had once pretended he would marry and went off to Calcutta; then to Posh, who would not be grateful. He hung on only through his wonderful letters, which were safe, revelatory but disguised, and required no commitments from his correspondents. Generous, loving, literary, unable to confront his own desires, he never imagined he had the genius or ambition that he believed kept his famous correspondents from writing to him very often, if at all. And he wrote his life into those letters.
THE complications do not, in the long run, much change our sense of FitzGerald, although they illuminate what we know. FitzGerald's biographers (perhaps because he was so generous and so loved) are inevitably protective of him. Mr. Martin, particularly protective of FitzGerald's innocence, which becomes the defense for some of his strangest and most unpleasant actions, insists he did not understand his own homosexual impulses, although at times the evidence strains the reading. His total and rather nasty revulsion from his marriage (which he entered, characteristically, out of a noble sense of responsibility to the bride's father, an old friend), his usual dislike of female company and his jealousy of his friends' decisions to marry make it clear that, despite his lovability, he was a misogynist. ``He was quite aware of how much talk about him there was,'' Mr. Martin reports of the days when townspeople both resented his treatment of his wife and were curious about his wanderings among the sailors. In any case, there is no evidence of homosexual practice.
But is is difficult to read so charming a biography of so honorable a man without feeling something of the claustrophobic quality of the public school, Cambridge, upper-class, literary society through which he moved. Mr. Martin makes us feel FitzGerald's complexity and difficulty, but he does not himself feel the narrowness of the life, so full, in its eccentric, clubby way, of love and generosity. The misogyny oozes through in almost every friendship. Mr. Martin doesn't quote a famous letter FitzGerald wrote when Elizabeth Barrett Browning died: ``Mrs. Browning's Death is rather a relief to me, I must say: no more Aurora Leighs, thank God! A woman of real genius, I know; but what is the upshot of it all? She and her Sex had better mind the Kitchen and their Children: and perhaps the Poor: except in such things as little Novels, they only devote themselves to what Men do much better, leaving that which Men do worse or not at all.'' Maybe this isn't as bad as it sounds. Surely he wasn't really glad the famous poet was dead, although Robert Browning read the letter many years later and took it straight. But it does tell us where women were in his life and imagination.
There is, as I have said, something sad about
the life of this loving and never quite satisfied man whose virtues were
so often denials of his own needs and a refusal to call attention to himself.
(He did not even allow his name to appear as the translator of the ``Rubaiyat.'')
Mr. Martin's biography is splendid reading, and it is a real credit to
it that he makes us feel the sadness. But he does not fully confront the
implications of what FitzGerald kept saying he knew about himself - that
he was not a first-rate writer - and what he kept tacitly suggesting about
himself - that his was not quite a first-rate life.
| AN EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK:
W. BLAKE WHO WAS QUITE MAD For a time he continued to hope to be a poet,
and in 1832 and thereafter his letters contained snatches of what he had
been writing. Of the stanzas of one poem he said that ''there is a sort
of reasoning in them, which requires proper order, as much as a proposition
of Euclid.'' The accompanying verses hardly bear out any claim of relentless
logic, but his statement suggests that he at least recognized his own difficulties
with organization. That he was thinking seriously about poetry is also
shown by his growingly shrewd remarks about his wide and somewhat unorganized
reading, which are among the delights of his correspondence. When he re-read
Shakespeare's sonnets, he found that he had ''had but half an idea of him,
Demigod as he seemed before, till I read them carefully. . . . I have truly
been lapped in these Sonnets for some time: they seem all stuck about my
heart, like the ballads that used to be on the walls of London.'' In l833
he told (William Bodham) Donne of having ''bought a little pamphlet which
is very difficult to be got, called The Songs of Innocence, written and
adorned with drawings by W. Blake (if you know his name) who was quite
mad, but of a madness that was really the elements of great genuis ill-sorted:
in fact, a genius with a screw loose, as we used to say.'' Of the
opening of Tennyson's ''Dream of Fair Women'' he wrote, ''This is in his
best style: no fretful epithet, nor a word too much.'' - From
''With Friends Possessed.''
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