lished, and came to England, settling in Bath.
Landor was sixty-three when he returned to England. His age is im-
portant to the story; he was nearly ninety when he died and the incident
which attracted me took place when he was in his eighties. In his old age
he was often ill but he was always mentally vigorous—his great Hellenics
appeared when he was seventy-two, some of his best Imaginary Conversations when he was seventy-eight; two of his best poems are “On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday” and “To My Ninth Decade.”
Although Landor’s fame had always been rather esoteric in the ro-
mantic period to which he properly belonged (he was born only five
years later than Wordsworth), in the Victorian time he began to be more
widely esteemed. To many young people he was a kind of monument of
the great days of romanticism, a bridge to the heroic time of poetry. He
made many friends among the young literary people of both sexes. They
gave him admiration and affection and he gave them what may well have
been all the paternal feelings that had been frustrated in his own family.
Perhaps just as he was a monument for the young, they stood for him as
the memorials of his own youth.
The last young person to whom Landor became attached was a cer-
tain Geraldine Hooper. She had been introduced to Landor by a neighbor
in Bath, the Hon. Mrs. Yescombe. Mrs. Yescombe had no real right to
the Hon. which she sported—she improperly retained it from her first
marriage to the younger son of a lord. She was now married to a clergy-
man of vague character and function who nevertheless, in so far as he
figures in the story, manages to emanate an aura of subtle corruptness.
It seems pretty clear that Mrs. Yescombe introduced young Geraldine
to Landor with a motive. She knew Landor’s weakness for young people
and there is little doubt that she was using Geraldine as a bait to ac-
complish her own purposes with Landor. In all that followed Geraldine
seems to have been foolish, passive and innocent. She was only sixteen,
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she was not very bright and she had been put into Mrs. Yescombe’s care
as a paying guest by parents who were not able to cope with some sort of
emotional difficulty from which she suffered. Landor liked to be gener-
ous with gifts; in order to advance Geraldine’s career in music, he made
her several presents of money. He also gave her some of his Italian paint-
ings. These were actually not of great value, for Landor was always being
fooled about old pictures, but he believed that they were priceless and
Mrs. Yescombe, who seems to have accepted his valuation, was most
eager to secure them. Landor’s gifts to Geraldine were usually made
through Mrs. Yescombe; they seldom reached their destination. And the
lady was apparently after more loot and even had hopes of figuring in
Landor’s will.
From here on the story gets indescribably complicated; I summarize
at the cost of innumerable details.
Landor began to suspect Mrs. Yescombe. He heard stories to her
disadvantage—of her cheating servants, of her filching petty sums from
shopkeepers’ tills. He began to believe that she steamed open his letters
and took out money. He believed that she was trying to manipulate his
actions. He learned of the misappropriation of his gifts to Geraldine. He
also began to believe that Mrs. Yescombe’s influence over Geraldine was
a malign one; and it is almost certainly true that Mrs. Yescombe had cor-
rupted the girl sexually.
Landor, having conceived a moral horror of Mrs. Yescombe, found
that all his passion for justice, all his fierce romantic morality dictated to
him the conviction that he ought to expose and denounce her, no matter
what the cost to himself. He made statements, wrote letters, threatened
public denunciation. Mrs. Yescombe and her husband pleaded with him
to be lenient and keep silence; but he was adamant. He prepared a pam-
phlet and could not be persuaded by John Forster (the prudent friend,
business agent and censor of Dickens and later the inaccurate biographer
of Landor himself) from having it printed. He wrote epigrams against
Mrs. Yescombe, some of them obscene in the Roman satiric manner,
and these he included in his newest collection of poems.
The Yescombes brought suit. On the advice and under the pressure
of friends—Forster chief among them—Landor yielded, and the case
was settled out of court by his reluctant retraction and apology.
But after a time Landor received further evidence against Mrs.
Yescombe, including a confirmation of his suspicion that she had cor-
rupted Geraldine. He now felt that, come what might, he must wipe
out the Yescombe infamy. He knew that if he published again he would
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certainly be adjudged guilty of libel. If guilty the obloquy as well as the
financial penalty he would face would be so great as to drive him from
England. Were that to happen, his only course would be to return to Flor-
ence and become dependent on his persecuting family.
He decided that he must publish the truth and take the consequenc-
es. He was eighty-one years old.
Landor’s decision was in the tradition of his youth. He was still the
man who, at thirty-three, had raised and armed a regiment to support
the Spanish revolutionists against Napoleon and he himself had been
its colonel. But it is clear that his unshakable determination in the
Yescombe matter was an insane obsession. His obduracy brings to mind
Wordsworth’s poem about the flower that had outgrown its ability to fold
itself against the storm:
It doth not love the shower, nor seek the cold:
This neither is its courage nor its choice,
But its necessity in being old.
Yet Landor’s action has all the appearance of courage and choice; and cer-
tainly it would not have been undertaken by anyone who was not by past
temperament eminently courageous.
The case came to trial, the trial went against Landor, the court-room
scene was horrible, the response of the press was ferocious; he was every-
where denounced as a vicious and obscene old man and the Yescombes
were vindicated.
There was little that Landor’s friends could do. Some did that little,
others slipped quietly away. Now the return to Florence was inevitable.
And by now he had surrendered the last vestige of economic hold over
his by now depraved family. His worst fears were quite confirmed—the
old man was so badgered that, one day, unable to endure any longer, he
fled the house and Robert Browning found him roaming the streets of
Florence dirty and deranged. Through Browning’s efforts he was com-
fortably established for his last days. Up to his death he was obsessed
by Mrs. Yescombe’s iniquities, maddened by the thought that she now
enjoyed his money, tortured by the world’s foolishness and injustice.
This—possibly with some inaccuracy, for I have not bothered to check
my memory of the details—is the story that attracted me. I scarcely nee
d
point out that I do not plan to “re-create” this story, nor to tell it in any liter-
al historical way. For one thing, my novel is to be a novel of contemporary
life; the 19th century episode simply suggested an idea which satisfies my
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very strong feeling (I have expressed it critically in my E. M. Forster) that a
novel must have all the primitive elements of story and even of plot—sus-
pense, surprise, open drama and even melodrama.
My first interest in Landor was in the heroic size of the man—he was
physically big, and then there was his careless fighting past (his middle
name was used as a descriptive nickname: he could be savage), the great age
to which he lived, the hugeness of his classical scholarship (he wrote Latin
more easily than English), the breadth of his emotions, the intransigence
of his poetical and political ideals, the absoluteness of all his passions. In-
evitably he suggests King Lear by his “kingliness,” his leonine qualities, his
absoluteness; and morally by his utter refusal to submit to reality; and then
of course by the external facts of his story. Like Lear’s, his story is about jus-
tice. But Lear learns about justice through suffering, which is brought on
by his acting with absolute passion, while Landor’s absolute passion from
which he suffers is, from the first, exactly a passion for justice.
Such a man was startling enough in Victorian England. I began to
think what a really heroic person like him might be in modern America.
Interesting in himself, he would be even more interesting in his effect
upon the people around him. Such a person would become enshrined
in the minds of lesser people; a circle of admirers would naturally form
around him and draw a kind of life from him. Such people would admire
him not so much for his present power—they would perhaps assume he
had none—but for his being a symbol of past power, the way everyone
gets to admire a dead revolutionist; his quiescence would be the condi-
tion of their love.
Suppose such a man, made into a legend and monument of himself.
Suppose him now to begin to act on his own great scale and according to
the lights that made him admired, his action being one like Landor’s, just
and right, but naïve, scandalous and impossible, an action that makes a
perfect dilemma. It would be like an extinct volcano suddenly erupting;
among the people who lived on its slopes a mighty disturbance would be
caused. And if these people were, as they could be, significant of the life
of the period, the disturbance would bring out in a dramatic way the real
assumptions—what in current jargon is being called the “mystique”—of
their various positions.
The dominant figure of my story is to be such a character. He will
have much of the quality and temperament of Landor—a very old and very
impressive man who had lived richly and daringly and had accomplished
much; his existence beyond the life of his own generation gives him the
appearance of the naïveté and simplicity we like to associate with “the he-
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roic.” Around him there is to be a group of people, all of considerable stat-
ure, though looking to the old man for the secret of strength and dignity.
Of this group, there is one member whose relation to the old hero
is particularly interesting and significant. He is a young man, just start-
ing in life as the old man is approaching his end. This relation to the
whole affair, to the “disturbance,” is a critical factor in his life, for such
a young man, if he lived in a group like the one I have in mind, would
be presented with all the materials of an “education,” not in the usual
novelistic way of giving the young hero a linear series of adventures but
by involving him in an intense dramatic incident in which characters of
some meaning in our civilization are also involved.
The social group I have in mind will be located in a New England
town of considerable tradition, inhabited by old families but also by New
Yorkers of some importance. We might imagine Concord, Deerfield,
Lennox, with a population something like that of Westport. In the dis-
trict there is a famous school which is to provide some of the characters,
among them a significant Headmaster, as well as a significant teacher
and his wife (for the Yescombe-characters?) [ sic].
We have, then, a great central figure with his aura of heroism and
heroic morality, and all the implications about human personality which
are raised by his senile obsession—implications similar to but larger
than those that arise from my story, “Of This Time, Of That Place.” Then
we have a young hero at the crucial point in his moral development. And
we have the sketch for a social group.
Our young man, as I now think, will enter the story at the point of
his entry into the social group, which to him is to seem complex and dif-
ficult. This is his first real step into the world. Born and brought up in a
large middle-western city, he has been put at a considerable disadvantage
by his parents’ lower middle class poverty. Yet within a narrow ambit he
has made a certain place for himself. His ambitions are intellectual and,
at twenty-four, he has won some intellectual distinction in his own city.
Think of him as doing a variety of unsatisfactory jobs—he has a part time
teaching position at the local college, he reviews books, he gives lectures on
modern literature at women’s clubs, he writes a little advertising copy for
a local art dealer, and sometimes he interviews literary notables for a local
newspaper. Think of him as practical, energetic, not a dreamer or a moon-
calf. He has real talent and he does not have the mechanical “shyness” of a
sensitive young hero; indeed, one of the notable things about him is his ac-
tive charm. He has what in a young man passes for maturity. He is decent,
generous; but he is achingly ambitious. He has considerable insight into
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the conditions of his society, he wishes to be genuine, a man of integrity;
yet he also wishes to be successful. His problem is to advance his fortunes
and still be an honest man. He is conscious of all the dangers; he is literate
and knows the fates of Julien Sorel, of Rastignac, of Frederic Moreau—all
the defeated and disintegrated young men of the great 19th century cycle of
failure. He, for his part, is determined not to make their mistakes.
His entry into the story is effected by a character as yet unnamed—
call him X. In his late thirties, X is brilliantly established in the world by
a complication of professions; it is at least a question if he has not made
his success by some compromise with his best talents. (This presents a
nice problem of invention to suggest something Time-ish and Fortune-
ish, with something of a less anonymous nature.) He visits the city of our
young hero, who is sent to interview him.
Our young man quite consciously sees X as a possible instrument of
escape from his prov
incial situation, but he is only half conscious of the
method he uses to involve X with himself. For X is caught by the young
man’s innocence—it suggests his own at that age (or so he imagines)—and
he is also caught by the boy’s possibility of duplicating his career, thereby
justifying its falsifications. As for our young man, he responds both to X’s
feeling for his innocence and to X’s feeling for his corruptibility. And so,
in a rather tense scene, the two proceed through antagonism—the hero
jealous of the older man’s power, X jealous of the younger man’s youth—
to a complex involvement. And when our young man, knowing that X is
a member of the community in which the old hero lives, speaks, with a
quickly conceived intention, of his admiration for our Lear-Landor charac-
ter and of his desire, never felt before this minute, to write a biography of
the hero, X undertakes to further this scheme by bringing the young man
to the old one. Through his friendship with the Headmaster of the school,
he procures our young man a teaching job with the express purpose of en-
abling him to be near Landor-Lear and to undertake the biography.
In this way our young man, both provincial and sophisticated, both
honest and scheming, is introduced with some drama into the scene in
which the action takes place. The nature of the society in the town is
such that he must inevitably meet people who can help him better him-
self—and tempt him.
What we now have is the young man in intimate relation to the old
hero (assume him accepted as official Boswell-Eckermann); we have him
in relation to X, a person of considerable stature and complexity; and we
have him necessarily in relation to the Headmaster, a young man of pro-
nounced spiritual views whose part in the story will be large.
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What is needed now is the filling out of the social picture (there are
as yet, it will have been noticed, no women in these notes) and the ad-
aptation of the Landor story to suit the requirements of the novel and of
modern sensibility.
Speaking in the most general way, the story follows this sequence:
the entrance of the young man into the new social world and his first
meeting with people of importance; his love experience; his relations
The Journey Abandoned_The Unfinished Novel Page 7