by Gary Lachman
Chatterton’s mother, twenty and with an older daughter born out of wedlock, was left penniless and was forced to set up house with her mother-in-law. She brought in money from starting a sewing school. Chatterton’s family had held the office of sexton in Saint Mary Redcliffe, a parish church, for nearly two centuries – the position was then held by Thomas’ uncle, Richard Philips – and the church, with its atmosphere of mystery and times long gone, was the single most important influence on the boy. Although he was deemed backward at first, Mary, Chatterton’s sister, taught him to read. He scorned modern books but was fascinated by ancient texts, their illuminated capitals attracting him like some talisman. He learned to read from a Black Letter Bible, and roamed the church grounds, becoming familiar with the inscriptions on the tombs, spelling his way through these traces of a lost world.
Around this time we find an early appearance of what was probably Chatterton’s central character trait. When his sister asked him what he would like painted on his bowl, he replied, “Paint me an angel with wings, and a trumpet to trumpet my name over the world.” Early on fame and all that comes with it was his goal. Yet years later he would lament, “It is my pride, my damned native, unconquerable pride that plunges me into distraction.”74 “Proud as Lucifer” was how a cousin he lived with in Shoreditch, before his last days in Holborn, described him, when he chastised her for calling him “Tommy.”75 “When was a poet ever named Tommy?” he asked. Not being very knowledgeable about poets, his cousin said she didn’t know.
Once he had mastered it, reading became his life’s blood; Chatterton devoured books whole, gorging on metaphysics, mathematics and works on antiquities. He haunted bookshops and was a regular at the circulating libraries – and this, we must remember, as a boy. He was also prone to trance states, or at least deep abstraction, and he would sit for hours, contemplating some inner world. He would also cry for no apparent reason. He seldom played with other children, and his sole amusement seemed to come from the old parchments his father had taken from the muniment room of the church. His father had used these to cover books, and his mother used them in her sewing, but Chatterton saved them from this abuse and secreted them away in a lumber room in the attic. Here he also brought paper, inks, and charcoal. His mother wondered what he did there, locked away for hours. Soon enough, the world would know.
At eight Chatterton was sent to Colston’s Hospital, a charity school. Here the basics in reading, writing and arithmetic were taught. While these did little to satisfy Chatterton’s appetite for learning, the school’s dress code had a deeper effect. The students wore medieval dress: a bluecoat, long surcoat, yellow stockings, and their hair was cut in a kind of tonsure. The curriculum depressed him but his sister noted that he seemed happier once he had begun to write poetry. At 10, his first poem was published in a Bristol paper. Soon after he had also completed a “Hymn for Christmas Day.”
His father’s talent for composition seemed to be resurfacing, but Chatterton put it to a peculiar use. He had spent the hours locked away in his lumber room with the ancient parchments performing a kind of resurrection – or, to put it less romantically, he brought his love of the past and his knack for poetry together and invented an idealized Medieval Bristol poet-priest, one Thomas Rowley, producing a series of poems which he claimed to have discovered among the church’s ancient texts. An audacious act for a boy not yet in his teens, but it was successful, and the authenticity of the ‘Rowley poems’ became a matter of debate for decades.
It was in fact an age of forgeries and frauds. The Scot James Macpherson had gained fame as the true author of the Ossian poems, seminal Romantic works by the ‘Celtic Homer’ that were translated by Goethe and formed the favourite reading of Napoleon. Palamazaar, a Frenchman who posed as a native of Formosa, wrote a book in Latin about his life; when his ploy was discovered, no one thought the less of him, the formidable Dr. Johnson remarking, “I should as soon think of contradicting a bishop.” And Horace Walpole, who played a major part in Chatterton’s fortunes, originally published his Castle of Otranto as a work “translated by William Marshall, Gent., from the original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto.” Chatterton may only have been trying to hit the popular note.
Chatterton presented his forgeries to some local antiquarians, who were delighted with his discoveries and, more importantly, asked no embarrassing questions about them and wondered if there were more. He obliged and for a time his hunger for achievement and distinction was satisfied. But not for long. At 14 he left Colston’s and was indentured to John Lambert, a Bristol attorney. Although the work was light – simple copying – and Chatterton was lucky to get it, he hated the routine and disliked having to eat with the servants. His attempts at poetry suffered as well; a servant found him writing poems and unceremoniously tore them up and threw them in the fire. As the years passed his misery increased until he spoke openly of suicide; when a letter he wrote to a friend saying that he planned to kill himself was discovered, his employer asked one of the antiquarians to speak with him – the last thing Lambert needed was a suicidal teenager on his hands.
Chatterton, who by this time was writing political satires for London papers, quickly realized the true power of the word. He realized that he had no future in Bristol, and his attempts to gain recognition by writing to well known figures, like Horace Walpole, were failures. Walpole questioned the authenticity of the Rowley poems, but more importantly was miffed at the idea of a teenage indentured servant speaking to him as an equal and said as much, forever after casting himself as the man who could have ‘saved’ Chatterton, but didn’t. Chatterton knew he had to get to London and so wrote an even more desperate suicide note and left it in plain view. Lambert took one look at it and was eager to wash his hands of the boy. Chatterton soon left for London, armed with five pounds, his notebook, the address of his cousin in Shoreditch, and his titanic pride.
Yet, in a brilliant essay, Richard Holmes argues that Chatterton didn’t commit suicide, but that his death was from an accidental overdose of arsenic, taken as a curative for syphilis, a common, if dangerous treatment at the time, a notion that Peter Ackroyd employs in his novel Chatterton.76 Holmes points out that traces of opium were found on Chatterton’s teeth when his body was discovered, and that he had more than likely been a user for some time, both his last letters and works like the weird, near hallucinogenic “African Eclogues” suggesting a state of consciousness associated with the drug. One of Chatterton’s friends in Brooke Street was a Mr. Cross, a chemist, and he more than likely supplied Chatterton with the narcotic. Opium was used widely as a cure-all until the late nineteenth century and it was often cheaper than alcohol. Chatterton was also living on his own for the first time in the few weeks leading up to his death. In Shoreditch he shared a room, a bed even, and had relatives around him. But on Brooke Street he was alone.
Poverty, hunger, pride and that strange sensibility which would soon be called Romantic would lead him to reject the brutal world around him – Brooke Street was known for its prostitutes and cut-throats – and to seek comfort in some realm closer to his heart’s desire, a realm accessed by himself and many others since through drugs. His friend the chemist Cross also told the scholar Michael Lort, who began to investigate the Chatterton story in the 1770s, that Chatterton “had the foul disease which he would cure himself.” The ‘foul disease’ was syphilis and that Chatterton would ‘cure himself’ is in character; he had pretensions to medical knowledge and at one point in his last days wrote Dr. Barrett – one of the antiquarians to whom he delivered the Rowley poems – to help him get work as a surgeon on a ship bound for Africa: a mad dream, perhaps, occasioned by the poppy? The usual cure for syphilis involved calomel and vitriol, but a quicker, if more dangerous method employed arsenic in small doses.
Arsenic for the disease and opium to kill the pain. Alcohol more than likely as well. For anyone a dubious brew, but for Chatterton, according to Holmes, a deadly one. Drunk, stoned, impatient and unsure of his
dose, Chatterton’s death may have been the result of a tragic miscalculation, rather than that of neglected genius. He left no suicide note, other than the phoney one which freed him from Bristol four months earlier. And from the tone of his writings in London, which jettisoned the pre-Morris medievalism for the barbed satire of political taunt, and the barbaric splendour of the “African Eclogues,” one doesn’t get the sense that Chatterton – proud, unbending and as convinced as ever of his genius – wanted to “fall upon the midnight with no pain.” Wild and unsupervised as never before, he may have just taken too much and the cure, as often is the case, may have simply turned out deadlier than the disease.
It’s a shame that unlike Francis Thompson and Meyerstein, Chatterton had no guardian angel to stay his hand, or at least to lessen his dose. Like Walter Benjamin, he seemed plagued by bad luck; money that would have saved him from starvation without curdling his pride came the day after his death, and a fed Chatterton would have faced the world with a different outlook. Who knows what might have come of it, and what the loss of such a powerful symbol would have had on the starving poets and neglected geniuses that followed?
Cesare Pavese
On the evening of Sunday 27 August 1950, the body of the Italian poet, novelist and translator Cesare Pavese was found in a room he had taken the day before at the Hotel Roma in Turin, a few blocks from his own apartment. He had swallowed the contents of over a dozen packets of sleeping pills and was fully clothed and lying on the bed. He was only 42. Pavese had spent the weeks prior to his suicide arranging as neat and orderly a death as he could, burning letters and documents on a brazier in his room, even going so far as to make sure that L’ Unità, the Communist Party newspaper, to which he contributed, had a good photograph of him in its files, presumably for his obituary. He had always believed that one should “seek death of one’s own free will, asserting one’s right to choose,” and now he had put that belief to the test. Not long before, Pavese had won the prestigious Strega Prize, the most sought after Italian literary award, and the novels he wrote just before his end, like The Moon and The Bonfires, probably his best known outside Italy, show a craftsman and artist at his peak.
The ostensible prompt for taking his life was his rejection by the American B-movie actress Constance Dowling77, but any reader of Pavese’s remarkable journal, published as This Business of Living, soon recognizes that suicide, what he called his “absurd vice,” was something he was moving toward practically all of his life – inexorably, one wants to say, aware of the cliché, but conscious of its aptness. Writing of Pavese, A. Alvarez remarked that he was the kind of suicide that is born, not made, and it’s clear that Pavese was one of those whom the “Treatise on the Steppenwolf” describes so accurately. “I know that I am forever condemned to think of suicide when faced with no matter what difficulty or grief,” he wrote.78 His suicide note, left on the first page of his copy of his philosophical Dialogues with Leucò, found open in the room, was a plea for those he left behind to make no fuss. “I forgive everyone and ask forgiveness of everyone,” he wrote. “O.K.? Not too much gossip, please.”79 The calm and nonchalance of these last words, reminiscent of Mayakovsky’s, contrast powerfully with the tortured final entry in his journal. “The thing most feared in secret always happens … All it needs is a little courage. The more the pain grows clear and definite, the more the instinct for life asserts itself and the thought of suicide recedes. It seemed easy enough when I thought of it. Weak women have done it. It needs humility, not pride. I am sickened by all this. Not words. Action. I shall write no more.”80
The chasm between words and action, or art and life, plagued Pavese endlessly. It’s almost too obvious to point out that when he finally succeeded in crossing it, what he achieved was death.
Cesare Pavese was born in 1908 on a farm where his family spent their holidays, near the small village of Santo Stefano Belbo, in the Langhe area of Piedmont between Turin and the Alps. Although he spent most of his life in Turin, where he worked as an editor and translator for the publisher Einaudi, the landscape of his early years made a deep, perhaps fatal impression. Pavese believed in destiny and his destiny was shaped by the rugged, austere hills of his birth, on which he loved to wander on long, solitary walks. The contrast between the city and the country, which, like other dichotomies in his life, he was never able to reconcile – “I am made up of many parts that do not blend,” he told his friend and biographer Davide Lajolo – became a mythic theme for him. The people of these hills were as rugged as they are, taciturn and reticent, and Pavese’s mother was no exception. When his father died from a brain tumour when Pavese was six, his undemonstrative mother offered little tenderness and warmth, though he got some measure of this from his older sister, with whom he would live for most of his adult years. Throughout his life, Pavese had difficulty with women, and although his dissatisfaction with Italian Communism, with which he belatedly but without real conviction became involved, joining the party after WWII, is often cited as an equal element in his suicide, it was really his inability to find love that turned him toward indulging in his “absurd vice.” As one critic remarked, “At the centre of his life there appears to have been an emotional vacuum which he tried repeatedly to fill, always without success.”81 Throughout his life, Pavese remained “the contemplative observer of himself who seeks … to break out of his solitude and yet continually fails to do so.”82
In his later years Pavese would try to recapture some sense of the innocence of his early days; yet, by most accounts his childhood wasn’t happy. He gives the impression of being an ‘outsider’ from early on – someone who, like the figure in Poe’s poem, “does not see as others do”83 – and, like the contrast between city and country, that between solitude and human contact is a central theme in both his life and work. Like many sensitive, intelligent children, Pavese stood apart from the life around him, exercising a capacity for distance that is essential for most writers, yet which would soon create a gulf between himself and the world.
Pavese’s first experience with rejection happened, as it does with most of us, in his teens. Like most romantics, Pavese was attracted by the lure of the inaccessible. Thin, scholarly, and not particularly handsome, throughout his life Pavese was drawn to glamorous, overtly sexy women, and although on occasion a Marilyn Monroe might be attracted to an Arthur Miller, the kind of woman that Pavese desired usually wasn’t interested in him. His first timid attempts at meeting girls resulted in fainting fits and when a cabaret singer he had met while in high school stood him up, he was sick for three months; their date was for six, but Pavese waited until midnight before admitting she wasn’t going to show. Pavese also seems to have been plagued by some sexual inhibition or self-consciousness: impotence and premature ejaculation turn up frequently in his journal; “The man who ejaculates too soon,” he writes, “had better never have been born. It is a failing that makes suicide worth while.”84
Although his novels have an existential air, and its understandable that film-makers like Michelangelo Antonioni would be drawn to his work, Pavese’s outlook is fundamentally romantic. Women are infinitely desirable, yet the real stuff of sex is nasty, dirty and ugly, and is always a disappointment. He is drawn to it, but repelled at the same time, and it’s clear that the social and political concerns in Pavese’s writings are an expression of his recognition that his detachment from life is essentially a product of immaturity. Yet he is not really a political writer, his association with Communism notwithstanding. His focus on the working class and the peasants in his novels is really an attempt to break through his isolation into ‘life’, yet it could never provide the kind of intensity that ‘really’ living does. It’s instructive that he speaks of living as a ‘business’. As one critic commented, Pavese saw life “as a necessary performance, as an artefact to be constructed, rather than a process to be accepted.”85 Self-conscious, awkward, rarely at home with himself, Pavese lacked that unconscious grace that many less thoughtful peopl
e seem to enjoy.
If life was, as Pavese thought, a business, it wasn’t one he was very good at. Like others we have met – Trakl, Anne Sexton, Benjamin – Pavese seemed adept at being inept. In a letter written to a friend the young Pavese confesses that he is “incompetent, timid, lazy, uncertain, weak and half mad,” and that he lacks any potential to “settle into a permanent job and make what is called a success in life.”86 And in a poem he sent the same friend, Pavese makes an early reference to suicide. He says that “one evening in December” he walked along a deserted road, with “turmoil in my heart,” and also a gun. He fires a blast into the ground, feeling the recoil. He then imagines “the tremendous jolt it will give on the night when the last illusion and the fears will have abandoned me and I will place it against my temple to shatter my brain.”87 This is a reference to an incident in real life, when Pavese’s best friend committed suicide, and Pavese was determined to do the same. He got a gun and went to the tree where his friend shot himself, but found he couldn’t repeat the act; he fired shots into the tree instead. The inability to complete the suicidal gesture stayed with Pavese, adding to his sense of incompetence.
The experience that would set him on his destiny as a suicide would combine both a woman and politics. In 1930, Pavese’s mother died. Although their relationship was never close, her death upset him deeply. He became even more cut off from other people, and his thoughts inevitably drifted toward suicide. In 1933, in order to get a position as a teacher, Pavese joined the Fascist Party, a necessity at the time. Soon after, however, he became involved with a woman, another teacher, who was a Communist and anti-Fascist. Pavese believed that his affair with Tina Pizzardo, “the woman with the hoarse voice,” would be his great love, and, when she asked him if he would receive letters for her from other anti-fascists, he agreed. Tina, however, was being watched, and the police soon raided Pavese’s house and found the letters. Pavese was arrested. If, as Tim Parks points out, he explained that he was in love and was only letting his mistress use his address, he probably would have been released.88 But this would have meant compromising the source of his happiness, and that was unthinkable. Pavese protected Tina, and the result was that he was first imprisoned, then placed in exile in a remote coastal village in Calabria.