by Martin Amis
New Statesman March 1973
Coleridge’s Verse: A Selection edited by William Empson and David Pirie*
The ‘intentional fallacy’ has been irking editors ever since W.K. Wimsatt’s discovery of it in 1946. William Empson, in his 100-page introduction to this new selection of Coleridge’s verse, quickly shrugs off these restraints. The editor, he says, has to make a guess at the author’s intention so that he can intercept the poem before it has been mucked up – after all, poets regularly get anxious and self-conscious about their work and tamper with it when it has gone dead on them; the editor, therefore, must gather the evidence and make an informed speculation about what the poet ‘really meant’. The editor, in other words, picks the bits that he thinks make the best poem. (Another ‘fallacy’ could be invoked in Professor Empson’s defence here; the editor is at least as likely as the author to know what the best poem is.) Professor Empson’s empiricism does lead him to see the creative process as far more furtive and equivocal than most of us would be willing to accept, but, as always, he is learned, lively, and often most stimulating when he is wrong.
Professor Empson and David Pirie select all the good poems Coleridge wrote – no great number – including passages from prolix failures like Religious Musings’. The main effort, however, has gone into The Ancient Mariner, which Coleridge never tired of worsening and which therefore poses the most serious editorial challenge. The result is an eclectic text which effectively rescues the pantheist poem of 1800 from the Christian one of 1817. The 1817 prose gloss – Professor Empson describes it at one point as ‘leering’ and at another as trying to put over a ‘greasy injustice’ – is omitted completely. The gloss is a distraction, certainly, and often a misleading distraction; but it has its moments of beauty, and, since all students and most curious readers will want to consult Coleridge’s later commentary, it might have been as well to include it in an appendix. As the text stands, without the gloss and without Coleridge’s nervous emendations, the Rime is a darker and more worrying poem.
Unsurprisingly, Professor Empson claims that The Ancient Mariner, not altogether unlike Paradise Lost, is a covert indictment of the Christian God. Coleridge’s intention was, so to speak, to ‘bore from within’, an aspect of the poem we no longer appreciate for the simple reason that it has been so successful – we would be pretty startled nowadays to hear anyone suggest that the Mariner actually deserves his punishment. It might be said that the 1817 version carries this meaning, too, if less candidly. At the end of the poem the Mariner, for all his sacramental torments, is still condemned to traipse round the country scaring people with his tale, and the poem’s chirpy sententia, ‘He prayeth best, who loveth best / All things both great and small’, does not actually say that praying and loving are going to do you any good. Professor Empson rightly takes the Rime as the work of a man who sees the universe as devoid of moral order, and his analysis of the poem as being fundamentally about ‘neurotic guilt’ is more or less unanswerable.
What is answerable, though, is Professor Empson’s suggestion that the Rime is, among other things, an ‘adventure story’, partly concerned with ‘maritime expansion’, and including a ‘horror of the Slave Trade’. Professor Empson thus identifies Life-in-Death’s skeletal bark as standing for a slave ship. Because the slaves’ body-heat customarily rotted of the ships’ planks after five to ten voyages, Professor Empson deduces that ‘while mulling over the first edition Coleridge felt’ (Professor Empson makes great play with phrases like ‘Coleridge would have thought’, ‘Coleridge must here have felt’) ‘that this point might not be obvious to everyone, so he wrote in the margin another verse, saying that the hulk was “plankless” ’. Surely, no matter what Coleridge felt, and no matter how much he mulled, the insertion of ‘plankless’ hardly makes the point ‘obvious’ to everyone. Perhaps Coleridge just thought it was a good image.
Professor Empson is equally coltish on the ‘adventure story’ line. With endearing, Boys’ Own eagerness he follows up what would have happened if the Mariner had been pulled in by the local authorities at the end of his voyage: ‘The accusing spirits … would next impose slanderous dreams on the magistrates at the court of inquiry … So the mariner would be driven into exile, probably on suspicion of having eaten the rest of the crew.’ John Carey once accused C.S. Lewis of writing about Paradise Lost as if it were taking place in North Oxford; Professor Empson here writes about The Ancient Mariner as if it were an eighteenth-century piratical skirmish on the River Don.
The more general remarks about Coleridge are so luminous that one wishes there were more of them. Professor Empson’s criticism has always depended on the intensity of his response not only to the work but also to the author, and he here shows a moving sympathy with Coleridge which – were all critics so intelligent – would make us want to lose the intentional fallacy for good. The more one studies Coleridge, it seems, the less one likes him, as the alarmed fastidiousness of Norman Fruman’s recent biography shows. Professor Empson is more patient. He is not slow to point out that Coleridge wrote very few good poems and he is very eloquent on the guilts and anxieties that inhibited him. And his throwaway conclusion – that ‘In [Coleridge’s] heart, I suppose, he always blamed himself for writing good poetry because it was showing off’ (i.e., it was a mere excrescence) – has a sad and inescapable truth.*
The Times Literary Supplement December 1972
* This piece appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, where I worked on the staff as a Trainee Editorial Assistant. I was twenty-three. William Empson, author of Seven Types of Ambiguity and Milton’s God, was one of my outright heroes (as a poet as well as a critic). When his devastating letter to the editor came in, I not only feared for my job; I felt like a starstruck clapperboy who has just been terminated by Arnold Schwarzenegger (see below). In those days, fortunately, all TLS reviews were unsigned.
* What I did was: I read the book, then sold it, then reviewed it. This partly accounts for my vulnerability to Empson’s first point, which ran as follows: ‘The reviewer says that the glosses to The Ancient Mariner, if removed from the text of the poem, had better have been given in an appendix. On pages 212–13 they are given in full, with line references, and on page 48, after the first discussion of them, the reader is told twice where they can be found.’ Here, with an elision or two, is my squirming reply:
Our reviewer writes: (1) Apologies are due to Professor Empson on his first point – a bad lapse. (2) I did not ‘assert’ that Mr Pirie and Professor Empson ‘say an editor should “pick out the bits that he thinks make the best poem” ’, only that this is what these editors end up doing. (3) I think a disinterested reader, as opposed to a cross author, would agree on the ‘boring from within’ point, and also that the Christian position on ‘cruelty to animals’ is peripheral to the moral scheme of the poem. Neither Coleridge nor, surely, Professor Empson, would want to rest his case there. (4) When I referred to Professor Empson’s ‘Boys’ Own eagerness’ I was referring not to his ‘style’ but to his eagerness, on a different point, which he does not question here. So far as I am concerned, Professor Empson always writes like an angel.
Tinkering with Jane
Sandition: A novel by Jane Austen and Another Lady
All Jane Austen’s novels are comedies – i.e., they are about nice young couples eventually getting married. Hero and heroine will both be supplied with a foil or distraction, someone whom they are mistakenly beguiled by for a time, and there will invariably be some pressure and interference from obstructive oldsters to be duly overcome. Further in the background, there will be a more vivaciously imagined cast of frumps, fools and snobs, whose structural relevance will generally be minor.
Presented with what appears to be a standard formula, someone was bound to come along and complete Jane Austen’s uncompleted novel, Sanditon, which she abandoned shortly before her death in 1817. The extant 20,000 words certainly contain most of the ingredients: a modest and impressionable heroin
e, a rich and witty offstage hero, one old tyrant, one endearing hobby-horseman, one young bitch, one sickly heiress, two flirts and three hypochondriacs. Plenty, it seems, to be going on with.
Jane Austen’s coyly anonymous collaborator is clearly a very ‘professional’ writer – a rather more contemplative Barbara Cartland, one imagines – and she develops the plot and characterization with a good deal of resource. More surprisingly, the Austen prose is fairly creditably sustained. Of course, Jane’s prose is not nearly as inimitable as Janeites will lead you to believe, and the Collaborator is able to reproduce the tart periodicity of her sentences in a blithe, unselfconscious way – with a minimum of toe-stubbing, though without much of the panache and asperity of her original. If Sanditon had come down to us in this form, I think it would be regarded as a mildly embarrassing piece of senilia rather than an obvious fake.
But what does the completed novel attempt to be about? The original Sanditon is not only a fragment, it is also a first draft, the only one that Jane Austen, a most assiduous reworker, didn’t have the chance to destroy. As a result, it is both sketchy and bald, offering few thematic starting-points to spur the would-be co-author. From what one can infer, Sanditon was to include some light literary satire, in the way that the first three novels satirized Mrs Radclife’s Udolpho and Fanny Burney’s Evelina. Burney’s Camilla is lingeringly mentioned early on – appropriately, since it’s about a high romance developing alongside a subcast of buffoons and hysterics – and the rich-wit hero is a strident literary poseur, an admirer of Richardson and his more vulgar copyists. But apart from this thread, and some preliminary guying of fashionability, the Collaborator undertakes a journey without maps.
Which needn’t slow her chariot, of course. Broadly, Jane Austen’s novels are about good behaviour, and her subsidiary themes (ordination’ in Mansfield Park, for instance) are really only ways of re-examining more or less static verities. The progress towards the Austen marriage tends to be one of self-improvement rather than self-discovery: each protagonist has to turn into the sort of person whom the other deserves to marry, and you’re meant to feel that the need for correction will continue long after the symbolic final kiss. This may seem to abet the view that Miss Austen is concerned merely with questions of propriety. But I would argue that all the pathos and eloquence of the novels derive from the characters’ subservience to convention: the reticence and constraint allow for a quiet undertow of emotion which it is impossible to simulate in more uncorseted fiction.
Take away the conventions, and little remains – as the Sanditon Collaborator here amply proves. Barely halfway through the novel, the hero’s ‘teasing gleam’ has become ‘quite irresistible’ to the heroine, and she gets ‘a flutter of singing, exclaiming, joyful spirits’ when he saunters by. But then, too, the object of this trashy pash would be well down the minor-villain league in the normal Austen canon. A liar and a trifler, he also masterminds his friend’s elopement (which would damn him irretrievably in Miss Austen’s eyes); and at one point the heroine forgives him his whoppers and his flirtiness because, after all, he was only furthering this noble end. Similarly, when the heroine herself is actually abducted by the crazed dandy, she regards the incident with the mildest amusement. ‘Bless my soul!’ muses her father when she tells him of her escape. Given such an easy-going world, one wonders what was stopping the hero from getting his leg over in the early chapters.
I suppose it all depends on what you go to Jane Austen for. The Collaborator, in her very pertinent ‘Apology’ to the reader, claims that ‘we turn to her for relaxation on plane journeys, in family crises and after the sheer physical exhaustion of a servantless world’. Well, 1975 is the bicentenary of Jane Austen’s birth – an appropriate time to suggest that her appeal must be rather broader than that.
Observer July 1975
Sticking up for Milton
The Life of John Milton by A.N. Wilson
The Milton multinational is now so far-flung that one must always query any addition to its holdings. A monograph on Milton’s ostler bills or ministerial memos might be in order – but another Life? A.N. Wilson’s biography is not a scholarly biography; it isn’t popular either, or semiotic or psychohistorical. It is not a critical biography. It is, rather, an uncritical biography. You expect something unusual when a youngish novelist tackles an icon. But The Life of John Milton is, by any standards, remarkably headstrong, beleaguered and quaint.
It transpires that an attempt at rehabilitation is on offer here, rehabilitation of the man rather than the work. Milton’s vicissitudes at the hands of twentieth-century taste – Eliot’s about-turn, Leavis’s full-frontal assault (‘we dislike his verse’), Christopher Ricks’s rearguard action in Milton’s Grand Style – interest Wilson not at all. His concern is for Milton’s personal image, which, he feels, has been tarnished by a vulgar modernity.
When Wilson refers to ‘Milton’s enemies’, he doesn’t mean Royalists, Catholics and Frenchmen. He means unsympathetic readers and commentators – people who don’t like him. We are warned about ‘the papist bias’ of the Yale Complete Prose, the ‘malicious and crude pen’ wielded by Robert Graves in Wife to Mr Milton, the cheap jibes of Dr Johnson. Milton’s enemies are those who persist in regarding him as a misogynistic, authoritarian relict, when in fact, Wilson argues, he was really much nicer than that.
The author goes to bizarre lengths, early on, to establish his subject as a charmer, a looker, a wag. Milton was ‘an infinitely intelligent and very beautiful youth’, such a vision, indeed, that ‘no engraver could hope to convey the delicacy of the complexion, or the beautifully textured auburn hair’. ‘An accomplished swordsman’, with his ‘wit, his good looks’ and his ‘young, laughing face’, Milton, we learn, was ‘quite a lady’s man’. (I think he means ‘ladies’ man’, but the slip may be instructive: Milton’s contancy is often praised.) It was for his exquisiteness that the undergraduate Milton was nicknamed ‘The Lady of Christ’s College’, not for any effeminacy or skittishness, or so Mr Wilson believes.
A desire to correct such common and hostile misapprehensions provides the main thread of this Milton. True, Milton was unpopular at Cambridge, but he was exasperated by ‘the silly, boyish chatter’ and ‘the crushing boredom of the dons’. It does seem frivolous of Cambridge not to have interested Milton more. No, Milton did not mistreat or estrange his first wife, Mary Powell, who left him: her behaviour was ‘silly and superficial’, or else she was ‘kidnapped’ by her family. He wasn’t particularly nasty to his daughters either: they were thieves and gadabouts, and he was right to disinherit them.
So, too, on the public stage. Mr Wilson sees the difficulties but always contrives, with the air of a fond schoolmaster, to give his star pupil the benefit of the doubt. Milton’s championship of divorce was not self-interested, although it seemed at the time that his wife had deserted him for ever: ‘we have the testimony of “Defensio Secunda”, says Wilson trustingly, ‘that he genuinely had the public good in mind’. An erstwhile foe of censorship, Milton performed a certain amount of ‘piffling’ censorship work for Cromwell – ‘unpleasant perhaps for the author of Areopagitica’. Similarly, the scurrility of Milton’s pamphleteering, considered scabrous enough even by contemporaries, was no more than ‘a delight in the rough and tumble’, the cut and thrust, of ecclesiastical controversy.
These exculpations involve Mr Wilson in a fair amount of generous conjecture. His book must set some kind of record as a thesaurus of speculation: it is conceivable, it is tempting to suspect, it seems more than likely, I rather doubt whether, it is not fanciful to think, if I rightly guess, presumably, surely, doubtless. At one point in his attack on the 71-year-old Mary Powell, Wilson quotes Milton’s first biographer: ‘her friends, possibly incited by her own desire, made earnest suit … to have her company’. Wilson slips in with a forensic ‘Notice that “possibly”.’ We do. We also notice that, a thousand words earlier, Wilson has used ‘rather improbable’, ‘no reason to s
uppose’, ‘probably’, ‘almost undoubtedly’, ‘probably’, ‘perhaps’, ‘very probably’, ‘probably’, ‘almost certainly’ and ‘perhaps’ in the space of a single page.
The selectivity, then, is rampant, and is abetted throughout by the vagaries of Wilson’s biographical style. Carriages ‘creak northward’, autumn leaves ‘rustle thickly’, Milton ‘paces’ or ‘wanders heedlessly’. ‘Thither, early each morning, Milton would squelch his way through the pigeon-droppings and the [etc., etc.].’ As is the case with Mr Wilson’s capricious use of the interior monologue, these flights of fancy have an unpredictable bearing on the arrangement of facts and sympathies.
Sometimes A.N. Wilson sounds like A.L. Rowse (‘What a contrast with the reality Milton knew at home! And yet, compared with Italy, how abundantly true!’), sometimes like Gina Lollobrigida (What sort of Church was it, this Church of England in which Milton was destined to serve as a priest?’). When one considers his octogenarian references to the ‘electric train’ and ‘the motor-car’, his glimpse of Milton in his ‘three-and-twentieth’ year or as a child already ‘drunk with that Castalian wine’ (i.e., relishing the classics), it is hard not to think of Wilson as Milton’s marooned contemporary, shielding his old friend from the depravities of ‘modern’ biographers. His descriptions of church interiors – ‘a somewhat baroque late seventeenth-century reredos with (apparently) Flemish communion rails’ – and his love of doctrinal contention are also impressively anachronistic, and do much to establish the book’s antique and antic charm.
Although it has been often enough discussed, the crux of Milton’s life is still hard to grasp. His existence was spent waiting to become the author of an epic poem. Hence the conventionality of Milton’s minor work; hence his often-dramatized dread of premature action. Wilson sees this of course, but he does not accept its implications. ‘We must remember always, when dealing with Milton’s egotism, that he had something to be egotistical about.’ He had Paradise Lost, as it turned out. But the poem cannot serve as a retroactive justification. In its light, however, Wilson is remorselessly indulgent to Milton, and correspondingly uncharitable to everyone else.