by Steven Moore
Not surprisingly, he prefers the style of barristers, for they are used to dealing with metaphoric analogies, as Mackenzie demonstrates in his own novel with analogies between personal and political relationships. (Nevertheless, his writing has elements of all four styles, adding to the incongruous nature of the text.) Finally, he recognizes that the best novelists are not imitators but creators: if his god is the author of “the first creation,” then novelists are the gods of subsequent and analogous creations.
Mackenzie’s own creation is a king-size haggis with perhaps too many ingredients, and as he admits, it’s only a swatch of what he intended. But Aretina offers a unique Scottish perspective on the Civil War, makes a lawyerly case for monarchy (which we the jury are free to reject, since it is based on the legal fiction of the “divine” right of kings), and charts a course for a genre that should be taken more seriously.
A satirical epilogue to the Civil War-novel genre, Don Juan Lamberto; or, The Comical History of Our Late Times (1661) chronicles in faux-medieval fashion (black-letter font and all) the ousting of Cromwell’s son Richard by a cabal of republicans led by John Lambert. Clearly a royalist, the author—“Montelion, Knight of the Oracle,” now thought to be poet and painter Thomas Flatman (1637–88)41—mocks the squabble for power after Oliver Cromwell’s death, portraying army leader John Desborough (also satirized in Butler’s Hudibras) as “the giant Desborough” chasing after “Ricardus, surnamed for his great valor the Meek knight,” with a club, and so on. There are a few cheap laughs, as when a conspirator’s oafish son, yclept “the overgrown Childe,” is dumbstruck at the sight of his future wife: “While he stood in this posture, his backside being ashamed that his mouth should be so silent, opened itself and with one single monosyllable did so alarm the company” (1.10). The author delights in exposing “the Seer Warriston” (a Scottish judge and statesman) trading sex for political favors with a prostitute and other scandalous in-jokes, probably funny at the time. Supernatural events enliven the second part of the short novel, which the gloating author concludes by enclosing his enemies in an iron tomb, “enchanted by magical art, . . . where we shall leave them conversing with Furies, walking spirits, and black pots of ale . . .” (2.13).
If Roxane Murph’s book-length bibliography of the English Civil War genre is to be believed—and it probably shouldn’t be, for she omits all the novels I’ve discussed, apparently because of their allegorical settings—there were no further literary novels about the conflict and its aftermath, only mainstream historical sagas, with the possible exceptions of Daniel Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720), Sir Walter Scott’s Woodstock (1826) and Adam Thorpe’s transhistorical Ulverton (1992).
Let’s get off the king’s highway and backtrack through some curious side streets of fiction. A possible challenger to Aretina’s place as the first Scottish novel appeared in 1652 with the ungainly title Exskybalaurum; or, The Discovery of a Most Exquisite Jewel. It’s certainly a fiction, if not a novel; its modern editors call it “a strange new mode blending panegyric and complaint, history and romance,”42 and the purported author—who signs himself Christianus Presbyteromastix (A Christian Presbyterian-Eater)—refers to it as a “heterogenean miscellany” (171). It is actually the work of Sir Thomas Urquhart (1611–60), Rabelais’ first and most creative English translator; a royalist, he had joined the army of Charles II just before it was defeated at Worcester in September 1651, when he was taken prisoner. He tried to talk the English authorities into releasing him in exchange for the jewel of the title, a universal language that would benefit the state. They balked, so at the beginning of 1652 he dashed off The Jewel, which feigns to be the work of an admirer who makes the case for Urquhart’s release in a book-length fiction that at times looks and sounds like outtakes from Gargantua and Pantagruel.
Imitating Urquhart’s hyperbolic, learned style of writing in homage, Presbyteromastix begins with a four-column genealogy (like those lists in Rabelais) that traces Sir Thomas back to Adam, and his mother back to Eve. Telling the fictitious story of how Urquhart’s 3,000-page manuscript on the universal language was looted and scattered after the battle and how he recovered a few pages from the Worcester gutters, Presbyteromastix quotes from Urquhart’s preface itemizing the features of a language that sounds sillier as it goes on. (“Three and twentiethly, every word in this language signifieth as well backward as forward; and however you invert the letters, still shall you fall upon significant words, whereby a wonderful facility is obtained in making of anagrams” [75]). He no doubt fails to reassure the authorities of Urquhart’s sanity by quoting his fantastic boast to have invented
the trissotetrail trigonometry for facility of calculation by representatives of letters and syllables, the proving of the equipollency and opposition both of plain and modal enunciations by rules of geometry, the unfolding of the chiefest part of philosophy by a continuated geographical allegory; and above a hundred other several books on different subjects, the conceit of so much as one whereof never entered into the brains of any before myself (although many of them have been lost at Worcester fight) so am I confident that others after me may fall upon some strain of another kind, never before that dreamed upon by those of foregoing ages. (72).
Already the modern reader is reminded of the mad narrator of Swift’s Tale of a Tub and of the Laputian projectors of Gulliver’s Travels, even though Urquhart did indeed publish a book on language (Logopandecteision, 1652) and an unreadable one on trigonometry (The Trissotetras, 1645). After some biting remarks on the covetous Scotch Presbyterians, the narrator then argues that Urquhart’s Scottish birth should not be held against him by his English captors and tells stories of some notable Scots, especially a young prodigy he calls the Admirable Crichton (pronounced CRY-tun). This novella-length tale is the most famous—OK, the only famous—facet of The Jewel, and though it’s based on a historical character named James Crichton (1560–82), it is clearly, fabulously, an exaggerated account of the young scholar, fencer, and bon vivant. His feats are matched step by step by Urquhart’s prodigious feats of language; ostensibly he was offering his language scheme to justify his release, but it’s his language skills that make his case.
The author describes a five-hour, one-man performance Crichton once performed for an aristocratic audience in Mantua, which almost literally knocks ’em dead: one female spectator requires “an apothecary with restoratives as [another] did that of a surgeon with consolidative medicaments” (117). Marvel at this rushing, page-long sentence as Crichton leaves his audience amazed and hooks up with a groupie:
During which time of their being thus in a maze, a proper young lady (if ever there was any in the world) whose dispersed spirits, by her wonderful delight in his accomplishments, were by the power of Cupid with the assistance of his mother, instantly gathered and replaced, did (upon his retiring) without taking notice of the intent of any other, rise up out of her box, issue forth at a postern door into some secret trances, from whence going down a few steps that brought her to a parlour, she went through a large hall, by the wicket of one end whereof, as she entered the street, she encountered with Crichton who was but even then come to the aforesaid coach which was hers; unto which sans ceremony (waving the frivolous windings of dilatory circumstances) they both stepped up together without any other in their company save a waiting gentlewoman that sat in the furthest side of the coach, a page that lifted up the boot thereof and walked by it, and one lackey that ran before with a kindled torch in his hand—all domestic servants of hers, as were the coachman and postilion who, driving apace and having but a half mile to go, did with all the expedition required set down my lady with her beloved mate at the great gate of her own palace; through the wicket whereof, because she would not stay till the whole were made wide open, they entered both; and injunction being given that forthwith, after the setting up of the coach and horses, the gate should be made fast and none (more than was already) permitted to come within her court that night, they jointly wen
t along a private passage which led them to a lantern scalier whose each step was twelve foot long; thence mounting up a pair of stairs, they passed through and traversed above nine several rooms on a floor before they reached her bedchamber; which, in the interim of the progress of their transitory walk, was with such mutual cordialness so unanimously aimed at, that never did the passengers of a ship in a tedious voyage long for a favourable wind with greater uniformity of desire than the blessed hearts of that amorous and amiable couple were, without the meanest variety of a wish, in every jot united. (121–22)
It would be decades before another writer could match this for novelistic detail and Voltairic velocity. Urquhart follows this with the most scholastic sex scene since Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili:
Thus for a while their eloquence was mute and all they spoke was but with the eye and hand, yet so persuasively by virtue of the intermutual unlimitedness of their visotactile sensation, that each part and portion of the persons of either was obvious to the sight and touch of the persons of both. The visuriency of either, by ushering the tacturiency of both, made the attrectation of both consequent to the inspection of either. Here was it that passion was active and action passive, they both being overcome by other and each the conqueror. To speak of her hirquitalliency at the elevation of the pole of his microcosm or of his luxuriousness to erect a gnomon on her horizontal dial will perhaps be held by some to be expressions full of obscoeness and offensive to the purity of chaste ears; yet seeing she was to be his wife and that she could not be such without consummation of marriage, which signifieth the same thing in effect, it may be thought, as definitiones logicae verificantur in rebus, if the exerced act be lawful, that the diction which suppones it can be of no great transgression, unless you would call it a solecism or that vice in grammar which imports the copulating of the masculine with the feminine gender. (124–25)43
In the final third of The Jewel, Presbyteromastix further defends Urquhart’s nationality by telling of other Scottish soldiers, theologians, poets, and (building to his main argument) scholars like Sir Thomas. By this point, the admiring narrator has elevated Urquhart to an allegorical representation of his nation, just as Civil War novelists did with their eponymous heroines. In the closing pages, the author pours out the rest of his pot of inkhorn words to demonstrate the linguistic lengths he could have gone to in Urquhart’s defense, and boasts that if he had so desired, he could have dressed his “quaint discourse” in “so spruce a garb that spirits blest with leisure and free from the urgency of serious employments would happily have bestowed as liberally some few hours thereon as on the perusal of a new-coined romancy or strange history of love adventures” (206–7). By using a rather ludicrous, word-mad narrator, by playing fast and loose with history, and by incorporating modes of fiction into his work, Urquhart created something that resembles an avant-garde novel, one that anticipates fictional oddities like A Tale of a Tub, John Buncle, Tristram Shandy, and ultimately the lexiphanic novels of Frederick Rolfe, Alexander Theroux, and Mark Leyner. A few months after The Jewel was published, Urquhart was (coincidentally) released from jail, and the following year he gave the English-speaking public the first volume of his obstreperous translation of Rabelais.
Urquhart’s female counterpart is the extravagant and erudite Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–73), who in 1656 self-published one of the most remarkable books of fiction of the 17th century, “sui generis and as bizarre as it is unique.”44 Nature’s Pictures Drawn by Fancy’s Pencil to the Life begins with a cycle of verse narratives, followed by a couple dozen prose works “of huge variety and range,” as her recent biographer says, “encompassing satires, comedies, tragedies, love stories, animal fables, dialogues, fairy stories, heroic romances, allegories—even autobiography. Some stories were very short, others the length of a short novella”45—and it is two of the latter that deserve special mention. A Contract is the intriguingly odd story of a scholarly young lady who speaks like a robot, dresses in black, and insists on marrying a profligate duke whose father contracted their marriage when she was six. As a child, Deletia studies history and moral philosophy but is forbidden “to read in romancies, nor such light books”;46 this work gives the impression Cavendish never read romances either, inventing the genre on her own. It has a fairytale quality, but is also daringly frank—Deletia’s uncle warns her not to “marry some young, fantastical, prodigal fellow who will give you only diseases, and spend your estate, and his own too, amongst his whores, bawds, and sychophants” (23)—as though Cavendish was unacquainted with the literary decorum of her time. Events like masques are defamiliarized with scientific objectivity, and the whole thing reads as though Leibniz had programmed his primitive computer to write a novel.
Assaulted and Pursued Chastity is even stranger, a cautionary tale for young ladies about the dangers of rape. Sharing Deletia’s dislike of romances, a proper young lady from the allegorical Kingdom of Riches is stranded in the Kingdom of Sensuality with no one to protect her from “rude entertainment from the masculine sex: as witness Jacob’s daughter Dinah, which Shechem forced.”47 The resourceful teen, burdened with the name Miseria, procures a pistol and shoots the first man who tries to rape her, a prince, which earns her his respect. Nonetheless, the prince imprisons her, and she prepares a suicide pill against his next assault but also, bizarrely, tells the prince she’d wed him if he were not not already married. Finding a page’s suit, she cuts her hair and escapes in his clothes, hops a ship, changes her name to Travellia, and winds up in an exotic land inhabited by purple people with white hair and weird, hybrid animals, vying with Cyrano’s Other World (which Cavendish later read) for hallucinatory strangeness. Pretending to be a messenger from the gods, “he” (as the protagonist is now pronoun’d) shoots dead a high priest, again earning male respect the hard way, and “civilizes” the natives before shipping out for home, only to be captured by pirates who happen to be captained by the prince (long story). She escapes again, he pursues her again, and both get caught up in a war between the Queen of Amity and the King of Amour. (The names of these countries remind us that Scudéry’s Clelia and its Carte de Tendre appeared about then.) Still in male drag, Travellia leads the queen’s army to victory over that of the king and his new favorite (you guessed it), the stalking prince, who challenges the young general to a duel and wounds Travellia in a symbolic rape. Belatedly recognizing him/her, the prince nurses Travellia back to health, by which time he learns his old wife has died, clearing the way for their marriage in one of the most imaginative treatments of the battle between the sexes ever written. If A Contract anticipates the odd novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett, Assaulted and Pursued Chastity evokes Angela Carter.48
Cavendish is best known for The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, published a decade later as an appendix to her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666). It’s a rather slapdash, self-indulgent utopian novel, more a daydreaming fantasia than an effective work of fiction. A nameless lady is abducted by an admirer and taken on a ship to the Arctic—most utopian adventure novels earlier in the century went south, but the ever-contrary Cavendish heads north—and after her abductors die she finds herself in a parallel world at the North Pole ablaze with starlight and inhabited by a variety of manimals: bear-men, fox-men, bird-men, spider-men, ape-men, lice-men, and so on, along with some satyrs and giants. The emperor of the Blazing World takes one look at her and makes her his empress, then disappears for most of the narrative as she forms scientific societies and instructs her hybrid subjects to gather scientific data and report back to her. The first half of the short novel consists mostly of their reports, which quickly grow tedious, followed by observations upon the metaphysical world furnished by some spirits she summons up. A “gallimaufry of reason and faith,”49 it reflects the protagonist’s (and Cavendish’s) keen interest in science but also her unscientific devotion to Christianity—to which she converts the Blazers via some flashy, Wizard of Ozzy special
effects representing hellfire—and her obsession with the Kabbalah.
The novel takes an interesting, metafictional turn about halfway through when the spirits convince the empress to summon the soul of Margaret Cavendish to coauthor “a poetical or romancial Cabbala, wherein you can use metaphors, allegories, similitudes, etc. and interpret them as you please” (183). Praising the act of literary creation, they assure her that “every human creature can create an immaterial world fully inhabited by immaterial creatures”—Cavendish called her manuscripts “paper bodies”—“And since it is in your power to create such a world, what need you to venture life, reputation and tranquility to conquer a gross material world?” (185–86). This is followed by a rather silly digression as the two souls of these “Platonic lovers” merge and tour the material world, patriotically singling out England and its king for special praise and discussing the financial problems of Cavendish’s husband. The narrative gets back on track for the final section, a cartoonish sci-fi attack involving submarines led by the empress and her creatures on countries threatening England, after which the empress and her soul-mate daydream their lives away in the paradisaical Blazing World. Although the novel is a testament to Cavendish’s intellectual range and imagination, it’s a little too fancy-free, and for modern readers a little too reactionary, politically and scientifically: the empress distrusts telescopes, for example, and near the end renounces her scientific societies on Cavendish’s advice, “for ’tis better to be without their intelligences than to have an unquiet and disorderly government” (202). The novellas in her 1656 collection anticipate 20th-century writers, but The Blazing World is stuck in the 17th century.