well-kept secrets
well - kept secrets The story of William Wordsworth
Andrew Wordsworth
Pa l l a s
athene
Contents Foreword................................................................................7 On the Road.........................................................................14 Spontaneous and Overflowing................................................43 France...................................................................................69 Our Lords and Masters.........................................................100 Lucy in the Sky.....................................................................123 Adam and Eve......................................................................143 Wordsworth & Co................................................................174 Brother John and Brother William........................................194 1802....................................................................................213 Masterclass...........................................................................237 From Genesis to Revelation..................................................263 The Whirligig of Time.........................................................303 The Child and the Man........................................................324 A Prayer for my Daughter....................................................338 The Long Yesterday...............................................................365 The Poetry that Endures.......................................................398 A Note on Editions and Texts................................................419 Bibliography........................................................................421 Notes................................................................................425 Biographical Notes..............................................................465 List of Illustrations...............................................................475 Index..................................................................................477
Foreword
By the time Wordsworth died in 1850, at the age of eighty, his lit erary reputation was well defined and comfortably assured. New editions of his poems were published regularly, and sold decently; and a year after his death an official biography enabled readers to relate the man and his life to the poetry that they had learned to love. Appropriate tributes were paid, and a statue was commis sioned, to be erected in Westminster Abbey in memory of the for mer Poet Laureate. Even as his features were being chiselled out of the block of marble,Wordsworth’s poetry was being effortlessly integrated into the national heritage, to be set in stone for all time. At this point, however, readers became aware that their un derstanding of Wordsworth’s work was in fact far from complete. For in July 1850 The Prelude was published for the first time.1 By any account this event should have led to a radical rethinking of Wordsworth’s oeuvre – revealing his achievement to have been greater, and his vision more complex, than previously imagined; and shifting the emphasis in his writing firmly towards the auto biographical dimension. But as it turned out the poem, which had been completed almost half a century earlier, and recounted events – such as the French Revolution – from the previous cen tury, arrived too late to make the impact it deserved. Nonetheless the fact that it was only published posthumously endowed The Prelude with a significance of a different kind: it was the first clear indication of Wordsworth’s tendency to hold back, and to hide 9
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important elements of his life and work from the public gaze, so as to preserve a private space that was inscrutable – at whatever cost to the overall coherence of his oeuvre. This reticence became even clearer when, in 1922, Emile Legouis published William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon, which told the story of Wordsworth’s time in France in 1791-2: of his love-affair with Annette; and of Caroline, the girl she gave birth to.2 That whole episode had been systematically covered up dur ing the poet’s lifetime, and was subsequently kept secret by his family for over seventy years after his death. (Three years after Legouis’ book came out the original (1805) version of The Prelude was published: this version of the poem did include a coded ac count of the love-affair with Annette, but without Legouis’ book the reader would have been unable to read the code and make the necessary connections). Three decades further on and another aspect of Wordsworth’s private life came under the spotlight, when in 1954 the scholar F. W. Bateson put forward the theory – in Wordsworth – A Reinterpretation – that William had been in love with his sister Dorothy. The possibility of an incestuous relationship had indeed been voiced during the poet’s lifetime – only to be dismissed or swept under the carpet. But when the theory resurfaced in the 1950s it would not go away. Too much had changed in the meantime, too much evidence and too many texts had come to light, for it to be possible to continue to believe in and uphold the image of the poet that had been so carefully defined a hundred years earlier.3 And to complete the picture, the full text of Dorothy’s Grasmere Journals was published for the first time in 1958, finally allowing readers to hear her side of the story. *** 10
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Since the 1960s several different versions of Wordsworth have coexisted uneasily. The pillar of the literary establishment is still there, with his patriotic sonnets, his village schoolmasters and lonely travellers, his sunsets and wild flowers and flocks of sheep. This image has endured not only because his poetry appeals to people who may be nostalgic for a certain idea of pre-industrial England. It also suited the twentieth-century poets who had ostentatiously turned their backs on his work. Successive generations of poets and intellectuals chose to consider Wordsworth as being out of date and largely irrelevant.They saw him as a pompous moralising bore, part of the unwanted baggage which had found its way into the nation’s cultural heritage, and which they were happy to be rid of. Besides, as so much of twentieth-century culture related to a world that was urbanised and industrialised, it was all too easy to emphasise the distance that separated Wordsworth’s concerns from their own. At the same time however another poet was emerging from the shadows. This was a person whose complex inner life defied any kind of definition: a man whose entire adult existence was structured by his relationships with different women, and who could not create or be happy without their help and presence; a writer whose career had turned him into a public figure, even though he depended on privacy and secrecy in order to explore those areas of human experience that meant the most to him. And, recognised at last as the great poet of memory, and of the play between the conscious and unconscious, he became the man who had rethought the terms by which literature defined itself. In the context of this re-evaluation of Wordsworth, The Prelude now came into focus as being central to his oeuvre. But like its author it remained ambiguous and hard to categorise. One could see it as the last of a line – arguably the last great long poem in 11
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English literature – or one could see it as the first of its kind – a groundbreaking enterprise that explored the workings of the human mind in a way that had never been attempted before. So in the late sixties, when I was growing up, Wordsworth was becoming a much more interesting person and poet than he had been. For my part I had my own reasons for wanting to get to know him better. When I was six years old, my great-aunt gave me a small chest that had belonged to the poet. It is made of wood, and covered in sheepskin embossed with a pattern of brass studs. On the lid smaller studs form the letter ‘W’; inside, a label indicates that it was made by T. Shaw, jun. of Kendal,Westmorland. When open the chest gives off a musty smell that no amount of cleaning will dislodge, and which evokes the tenacious cold and damp of English country houses. The chest became my talisman. I placed it next to my bed; and have had it in my bedroom, wher ever I have lived, ever since. Wordsworth became my constant companion: by day we shared the same surname (William’s younger brother Christopher was my great-great-great grandfather), and by night his spirit slept close by me in the little wooden chest (or so I imagined). But the man himself remained profoundly enigmatic. I had stud ied his poetry both at school and university, and knew it quite well; but whenever I tried to explore a part of his work in depth or in detail, I lost my way in a maze of half-meanings and coded suggestions – a sort of labyrinth in which Wordsworth hid him self so successfully that I could never be quite sure of who he really was. This began to irritate me – until one day I decided to try and resolve the matter by studying both his work and his life in a thorough and systematic way. Not with the aim of providing a ‘definitive version’ of Wordsworth that necessarily had a general validity, but rather of reaching an understanding of the poet and 12
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of his poetry that I at least could be satisfied with. This book is the record of that quest. *** As anyone who has studied literature (or art, or music) knows, a clear distinction is made in the academic world between an artist’s work and his or her life. What really matters are the works themselves (and the scholarly criticism of them). Biography is of secondary interest: it is thought of as a valuable accessory – as photographs also can be – in documenting aspects of an artist’s life, but there its usefulness ends. The work of art is considered as being autonomous, standing apart from – and slightly above – the mass of often messy and mundane material that constitutes a human existence. This principle is particularly hard to challenge where English literature is concerned, because of the example of Shakespeare. The great Elizabethan stands at the heart of English culture, and continues to speak to us with urgency and power four hundred years after his death; yet we know precious little about his life. One can invent endless possible scenarios (like the one in the film Shakespeare in Love), but the true drama rests in the plays themselves. The tacit assumption for students of litera ture is, therefore, that what holds true for Shakespeare must hold true generally. But does it? Almost unintentionally Wordsworth demonstrat ed how fragile the assumptions were on which such judgements were based. By placing himself at the centre of his poetry (most obviously in The Prelude, but in reality in all his work), he showed that an individual’s life has a direct bearing on the meanings gen erated by his or her art. Not just an influence, but a clear impact. With Wordsworth, the distinction between art and biography 13
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fails spectacularly. We cannot begin to understand his art if we do not also scrutinise his life, with the same rigour that an academic would apply to the texts. This book therefore moves between two genres or categories. It is not a biography, nor is it a work of scholarship: it is a bit of both, and something different from either. I prefer to think of it as a portrait – of both the man and his work. Curiously for someone who was so indifferent to outward ap pearances, Wordsworth seemed quite happy to sit for his portrait when asked to do so. In all, more than eighty portraits, sketches and busts were done of him while he was alive; and during one visit to London, in 1831, he agreed to pose for four different painters. In part this compliance can be explained as simple pub lic relations: in middle age and beyond Wordsworth took great care about the way he presented himself and his work to the gen eral public, even as he had ignored such niceties and conventions as a young man. But I like to think there was also another reason for his willingness to have his portrait done, and that was to see how unconvincing the result was. The tension between the visi ble and the real was central to his poetry – and what better way was there of confirming this than by contemplating portraits of himself which failed to reach inward to the poet’s soul, paintings and drawings which really had nothing poetic about them at all? Dorothy, who as always put herself on the same wavelength as her brother, summed up the Wordsworth sentiments nicely in a letter of 1831. Commenting on a request from the Master of St John’s College, Cambridge (where Wordsworth had studied), for a portrait of the Poet to be hung in the College, she noted that, Of course my brother consents; but the difficulty is to fix on an artist. There never yet has been a good portrait of my 14
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brother. The sketch by Haydon, as you may remember, is a fine drawing – but what a likeness! All that there is of likeness makes it to me the more disagreeable. (June 13, 1831)
Maybe though a portrait in words has a better chance of suc ceeding, by virtue of using the same medium as the poet used to express himself. A written portrait can weave together bio graphical material with lines or passages from the poetry, thereby recreating the ebb and flow between life and art that is the artist’s natural condition; and – hopefully – dramatising honestly and accurately the interaction of inner and outer worlds that is at the heart of Wordsworth’s poetry. Like all portraits this one is subjec tive – it offers a personal interpretation of the poet, rather than an impartial assessment of the man and his oeuvre. That said, ‘I have at all times endeavoured to look steadily at my subject’ (to use Wordsworth’s own words from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads). I think that is what Wordsworth would have wanted, and I hope that in this way the book remains true to the spirit of his poetry.
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