Sidetracks

by Richard Holmes

  Exactly why poor Oscar should have hit upon this lugubrious title remains to be seen. For the moment it is sufficient to remember that he chose it in prison, and that he carried it with him into exile and – quite soon – into death.

  Wilde’s grand-uncle (on his mother’s side) was the Reverend Charles Robert Maturin, an eccentric Irish curate of St Peter’s, Dublin. In 1820, at the age of forty, the Reverend Maturin startled his parishioners by publishing the extraordinary piece of Gothic fiction known as Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale. Despite its modest subtitle, it ran to four substantial volumes, and was constructed in a most intricate, not to say devious manner, from a whole series of interlocking stories, each one nesting inside the other on the principle of a set of Chinese boxes or Russian dolls.

  It was rumoured to be replete with all the terrors of the genre – comfortably outdoing the haunted castles of Horace Walpole, the fiendish monasteries of Monk Lewis, and the vapouring heroines of Mrs Radcliffe. Naturally, it was much mocked by the English reviewers of the day, who regarded Gothic Horror as irretrievably down-market. Croker growled in the Quarterly: ‘Mr Maturin has contrived, by a ”curiosa infelicitas” to unite in this work all the worst peculiarities of the worst modern novels. Compared with it, Lady Morgan (author of The Wild Irish Girl) is almost intelligible – The Monk, decent – The Vampire, amiable – and Frankenstein, natural.’

  No doubt because of this, the novel leapt into a second edition, was adapted for the stage, and was shortly translated into French (twice by 1822), and later German and Spanish. Its European popularity has never waned since, and a Russian translation in a heavy black cover like a Bible appeared only four years ago.

  Much more surprising, however, it became a cause célèbre among the leading Romantic and Symbolist writers in France. Balzac glorified it in L’Elixir de longue vie, and even wrote a satirical sequence, Melmoth Réconcilié (1835). Admiring references and epigraphs can be found in the works of Hugo, Baudelaire, Gautier, Eugène Sue, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, and Lautréamont, whose Chants de Maldoror pinches several morbid scenes.

  Baudelaire, writing On My Contemporaries (1865), observed majestically: ‘Beethoven began to stir up those worlds of melancholy and unappeasable despair which massed like thunderclouds on the inner horizon of man. Maturin in the novel, Byron in poetry, Poe in the analytical romance … all admirably expressed the blasphemous element in human passion. They cast splendid, dazzling shafts of light on the hidden Lucifer figure who is enthroned deep in every human heart. I wish to suggest by this that modern art is essentially demoniac in tendency.’

  This places the Reverend Maturin in unexpectedly influential company. Nor was Baudelaire referring to conventional, cardboard ‘demons’. Certainly, the hero of Melmoth is on closer inspection no ordinary fiend. In fact, apart from a certain contract made with the powers of darkness, he seems to have been a rather studious and distinguished Anglo-Irish gentleman of the seventeenth century. ‘There was nothing remarkable in his figure,’ said one in the novel who had met him on his travels in Madrid (and lived to tell the tale). His demeanour was quiet, his dress sober, he did not carry a sword. Only there was something about his expression – ‘the eyes particularly’ – which could not fail to appal.

  Accustomed to look on and converse with all things revolting to nature and to man – for ever exploring the madhouse, the jail, or the Inquisition, the den of famine, the dungeon of crime, or the death-bed of despair – his eyes had acquired a light and language of their own – a light that none could gaze on, and a language that few dare understand.

  Who was Mr Melmoth, that he frequented such grim institutions and dark secret places of the heart? He was a man, whatever else he might be, on a lifelong – a more than lifelong – pilgrimage. What he sought was a single victim. Someone whose life was so terrible, so tormented, so trapped, that as an act of rational choice – an act of madness, or delirium, was not valid – they would agree to change places with him. In this bargain they would purchase their freedom in exchange for ‘an unutterable condition’ which Melmoth proposed.

  It is typical of Maturin that in the course of this long novel we never learn precisely what this ‘unutterable condition’ is. But it becomes clear that Melmoth has sold his soul in exchange for certain kinds of physical and intellectual gifts, and an extension of his natural life for a term of 150 years. The one way he can escape from final payment on this transaction is to transfer the deal to another human being before his time is up. It is a kind of diabolic mortgage. Hence Melmoth’s ghastly search among the suffering and oppressed.

  The legend of the Satanic pact is, of course, one of the most venerable in European folklore and literature. The figures of Cain, Dr Faustus, Ahasuerus the Wandering Jew, all express it; and Marlowe, Goethe, Byron, Coleridge and Thomas Mann have based masterpieces on it. It also had wide popular currency in English thriller writing of the nineteenth century – William Godwin’s St Leon (1799), Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Bottle Imp, and M. R. James’s Casting the Runes are notable variations.

  But Maturin’s originality lay in transferring attention from the mythology of the horrendous pact, to the human psychology of those in extremis tempted to give way to it. What kind of despair could endanger them? The Tempter, Melmoth, is human. Apart from its outer frame-story, the novel is very little concerned with supernatural stage business. It is fundamentally a study in oppression – particularly the oppression of institutions and customs – explored in various convenient Gothic forms.

  There are six main tales, though only a flow-chart could show how they follow, drop through, open out, and close back round each other, like some mad emperor’s mechanical puzzle. The first concerns Stanton, an Englishman lured into a lunatic asylum; the second Monçada, a young Spaniard trapped in a monastery and then an Inquisition prison; the third, Immalee, an ‘Indian’ maiden marooned on a palm-tree island; the fourth Isaidora, a Spanish debutante doomed to an arranged marriage; the fifth, the Walbergs, a loving German Protestant family torn apart by sudden poverty and unemployment; and the sixth, Elinor and John Sandal, two Shropshire lovers ruined by a greedy mother. Each one also contains several sub-tales and anecdotes. But every one of them concerns some sort of imprisonment of the body or the spirit. Even when someone plays chess in Maturin, they break off leaving the Queen en prise.

  The pains that most of these intended victims undergo are mental rather than physical, though they can reach forms of torment where the borderline is blurred in hallucination or dream. Here, in a celebrated passage, the young monk Monçada suffers a nightmare on the eve of his interrogation by the Spanish Inquisition:

  The next moment I was chained to my chair again – the fires were lit, the bells rang out, the litanies were sung – my feet were scorched to a cinder – my muscles cracked, my blood and marrow hissed, my flesh consumed like shrinking leather – the bones of my legs hung two black withering and moveless sticks in the ascending blaze – it ascended, caught my hair – I was crowned with fire – my head was a ball of molten metal – my eyes flashed and melted in their sockets – I opened my mouth, it drank fire – I closed it, the fire was within – and still the bells rung on, and the crowd shouted, and the king and queen, and all the nobility as I burned and burned! … Misericordia por amor di Dios! My own screams awoke me – I was in prison, and beside me stood the Tempter.

  Strikingly horrible as this passage is (and pointing, in its rhythms especially, towards Edgar Allan Poe), it remains within the hyperbolic conventions of eighteenth-century Gothicism, only a breath away from outright laughter. Indeed it is in this suppressed laughter, on the reader’s part, that much of its grotesque power probably lies. Not for nothing Maturin was dubbed ‘the Fuseli of novelists’.

  Who was the obscure Irish curate who created Melmoth and his labyrinth of victims? How did he become such an epicure of terror and oppression? Charles Robert Maturin was no clerical jailbird or insurrectionary priest, and he lived quietly through the upheavals o
f the French Revolution and the first bloody outbreaks of Irish nationalism in Dublin, under Wolfe Tone and Emmet. Yet these things left their inner mark, and later in life he claimed that a Huguenot ancestor had spent twenty-six years in the Bastille.

  Born in 1780, the youngest son of a prosperous Irish civil servant, Maturin graduated at Trinity College, Dublin, and took Holy Orders in the Protestant Church. His first curacy was at the remote country town of Loughrea, in Galway, and here he came in touch with the profound superstition and misery of the local people. By the age of twenty-four, however, he had been appointed as one of the curates of St Peter’s, living in the fashionable quarter of St Stephen’s Green in Dublin, with a stipend of some £80 per annum. He was a youthful, elegant figure – his portrait shows something of a clerical dandy, with open shirt and graceful fingers – and he quickly married his childhood sweetheart, Henrietta Kingsbury, who had musical talents and useful connections with the Irish Episcopacy.

  But Maturin was disappointed in his hopes of early preferment. His seniors found him too colourful and unstable: a love of dancing, amateur theatricals and mischievous mimicry, alternated with strange fits of melancholy and distraction. He also revealed an inconvenient literary bent – publishing in rapid succession a series of garish romances: The Fatal Revenge in 1807, The Wild Irish Boy in 1808, and The Milesian Chief in 1812. This was not the curriculum vitae of a future bishop.

  Maturin’s Preface to the latter work is revealing of his situation as he saw it at the age of thirty-two: ‘If I possess any talent, it is that of darkening the gloomy, and deepening the sad; of painting life in the extremes, and representing the struggles of passion when the soul trembles on the verge of the unlawful and the unhallowed. In the following pages I have tried to apply these to the scenes of actual life: and I have chosen my own country for the scene, because I believe it is the only country on earth where, from the strange existing opposition of religion, politics and manners, the extremes of refinement and barbarism are united and the most wild and incredible situations of romantic story are hourly passing before modern eyes. In my first work I attempted to explore the ground forbidden to man; the sources of visionary terror; “the formless and the void”: in my present I have tried the equally obscure recesses of the human heart. If I fail in both, I shall – write again.’

  Maturin’s sense of being trapped in Ireland, his clerical career frustrated and literary recognition remote, was now compounded by financial crises. His father was sacked from his senior position in the Dublin Post Office on an unfounded charge of malfeasance; and a distant relative, possibly a rascally cousin, inveigled Maturin into going security on a business that promptly went bankrupt. Plunged into debt, and with a household now including nine dependants and his difficult old father, Maturin desperately took on private pupils, and wrote away more furiously than ever. The autobiographical basis of one of Melmoth’s tales – the Walberg family – was already taking shape.

  Then in 1816, Maturin’s fortunes dramatically changed. He had decided to try his luck with a stage melodrama, and the resulting script – Bertram, or the Castle of St Aldobrand – reached the notice of Walter Scott, who passed it on with an amused recommendation to Byron, then chairman of the Drury Lane Theatre Committee. A single stage-direction catches the flavour of the piece: ‘The Rocks – The Sea – A Storm – The Convent illuminated in the background – The Bell tolls at intervals – A group of Monks on the Rocks with Torches – A Vessel in Distress.’

  To Maturin’s amazement, the play was immediately accepted and a brilliantly successful production was mounted in May 1816, with Kean in the star role. Byron sent him fifty guineas; John Murray bought the book copyright for £350; and box office receipts earned him more than £500. Maturin visited London (the only time in his life he ever left Ireland), was applauded at Drury Lane, and did a breathless round of the literary drawing-rooms. For a brief, brief moment he was famous, and what is more, free.

  Back in Dublin he lived in a dreamlike whirl. He was the hero of his own household. He bought Turkey carpets, ottomans, marble tables, silk wallpapers, elaborate lustres, and had his parlour expensively panelled with painted boiserie depicting the scenes from his novels. He became a habitué of Lady Morgan’s Dublin salon, and indulged his passion for dancing ‘with young persons’, even joining a racy Gavotte Society that met three mornings a week. (There are some nasty dancing metaphors in Melmoth.)

  ‘His character, habits and opinions seemed to undergo a total alteration,’ a friend later wrote. ‘He returned to Ireland, gave up his tuitions, indulged in the intoxications of society, and became a man of fashion, living upon the fame of his genius.’ He was thirty-six.

  At this time he was said to sit composing amid his own house parties, with a red patch pasted on his forehead to indicate that he was in the throes of creation. Subsequently that patch must have come to seem like the mark of Cain.

  Maturin’s time of triumph was bitterly short – less than a year. His subsequent melodramas – Manuel (1817) and Fredolfo (1819)–flopped hopelessly at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Coleridge wrote a destructive review of his work, which he unkindly republished in the Biographia Literaria. A scheme of Byron’s, to make over the royalties from his poems, fell through because of Murray’s objections (‘It could be in no respect different to you – whether I paid to a whore or a hospital – or assisted a man of talent in distress,’ complained Milord) – and the three intended beneficiaries, Maturin, Godwin, and ironically Coleridge, received nothing.

  Maturin’s old debts absorbed all his remaining royalties. He was soon writing to Murray: ‘There is not a shilling I have made by Bertram that has not been expended to pay the debts of a scoundrel for whom I had the misfortune to go security, so here I am with scarce a pound in my pocket, simpering at congratulations on having made a fortune.’ One catches the bitter lilt of his voice.

  By 1817, the complaints had become more pathetic. ‘Let me beg you to write to me. I cannot describe to you the effect of an English letter on my spirits; it is like the wind to an Aeolian harp. I cannot produce a note without it. Give me advice, abuse, news, anything or nothing (if it were possible that you could write nothing), but write –.’

  For Maturin the iron door of circumstance had clanged shut once more, and this time for ever. ‘There is no room for Irishmen in England,’ he groaned.

  It was in this dark mood that he began to scrawl down the first wild tales that turned into the maze of Melmoth’s wanderings across Europe in search of salvation. Much of his adolescent reading, from the Arabian Nights and Glanville’s History of Witchcraft, to Percy and Ossian and La Religieuse of Diderot, swam back into his mind; so too did personal memories of the Dublin street riots, the English suppressions, and the deathbed visions of his country parishioners (many footnotes in Melmoth attest to these). But the master-idea, said Maturin, came to him during the course of a late Sunday evening’s sermon at St Peter’s in 1817.

  He was speaking gloomily of the infinite mercy of God, and looking down at his little flock amid the flickering candlelight, he suddenly exclaimed: ‘At this moment is there one of us present, however we may have departed from the Lord, disobeyed his will, and disregarded his word – is there one of us who would, at this moment, accept all that man could bestow, or earth afford, to resign the hope of his salvation? No, there is not one – not such a fool on earth, were the enemy of mankind to traverse it with the offer!’

  A silence fell in the church, the wind howled, and as the French say an angel – or something worse – walked overhead. Maturin testifies that, in that silence, he reflected on his own lot, and somewhere a pair of baleful eyes first opened their lurid lights, and Melmoth was born – or reborn – and began walking on the wild cliff tops of County Wicklow. The passage can still be read in his published Sermons (1819).

  While he wrote Melmoth, Maturin seems to have become a ghost of his former self. He had gone bald. The expensive furnishings of his house in York Street were pr
ogressively sold off, and even the stone flagged corridors left uncarpeted.

  He no longer composed in the cheerful parlour, but took long solitary afternoon walks and returned after dark to shut himself up in his study to write. As he worked, he seemed to withdraw into some kind of bleak inner world, his quill pen moving with sinister speed as if under dictation. A Dublin friend recalled of this time:

  I have remained with him repeatedly, looking over some of his loose manuscripts, till three in the morning, while he was composing his wild romance of Melmoth. Brandy-and-water supplied to him the excitement that opium yields to others, but it had no intoxicating effect on him; its action was, if possible, more strange, and indeed terrible to witness. His mind travelling in the dark regions of romance, seemed altogether to have deserted his body, and left behind a mere physical organism; his long pale face acquired the appearance of a cast taken from the face of a dead body; and his large prominent eyes took a glassy look; so that when, at the witching hour, he suddenly without speaking raised himself and extended a thin and bony hand, to grasp the silver branch with which he lighted me downstairs, I have often started and gazed on him as a spectral illusion of his own creation.

  No doubt this description has gained a certain blarney in the retelling. Yet it corresponds oddly with the sensation of blind, headlong speed in Maturin’s narrative, which makes it so readable, and prompted the New Monthly Review critic of 1821 to observe: ‘Maturin will ransack the forgotten records of crime, or the dusty museums of natural history, to discover a new horror. He is a passionate connoisseur in agony. His taste for strong emotion evidently hurries him on almost without the concurrence of the will.’ A hundred years later, André Breton recognized in it the écriture automatique of Surrealism.