The Book of Lost Books (29 page)
Is Goethe relevant to the twenty-first century? Or rather, is the twenty-first century relevant to Goethe? Failed-successful, classical-romantic, libertine-curmudgeon, poet-biologist, novelist-physicist, artist-librettist, radical-conservative: Goethe might yet, in his refusal to be easy, signal the way in which we too might splice a dash and imagine a bridge between the past and the future.
Robert Fergusson
{1750â1774}
SOME PHYSICISTS, INCLUDING Leibniz, have speculated that there exist an infinite number of quantum universes, which reflect and encompass every possible eventuality. If so, there will be one in which Robert Fergusson did not die, age twenty-four, in an Edinburgh Bedlam cell. The alternative Robert Fergusson would still have gone to St. Andrews University, where his roister-doistering and sharp wit would lead another student to graffiti a copy of volume III of Fielding's
Miscellanies
with claims that Fergusson was a “stinking fairy” and a “snake in human form.” He would narrowly avoid being sent down through the protection of the tutor and poet William Wilkie.
He would still have been employed copying records in the Commissary Office when he returned to his native Edinburgh, and spend his evenings debating and carousing with the folk-song collector David Herd, the painter Henry Raeburn, the not-yet-notorious William Brodie, and other fellow members of the Cape Club. He would still have written the most innovative, exciting, and daring Scottish poetry in nearly three centuries; but he would not have succumbed to mania and despondency, nor would he have burned all his manuscripts, nor would he have died in a frantic rage and filthy conditions.
Fergusson's poetic talents are seen most clearly in his poems in Scots; however, his vernacular verse is not a retreat into some couthie, cozy nostalgia. It brims with modernity and bristles with deft, half-mocking neoclassical grace notes, like the acciaccaturas of a Mozart sonata. In his poetry, Edinburgh was both the demotic, almost demonic Auld Reikie and the elegant, pseudo-Latin Edina; a place where Boreas blows over the Nor' Loch Brig and Phoebus jostles with Luckie Middlemist. Although his publications led some minor rhymers to invoke the late Allan Ramsay, who had done much to get old Scottish verse back in print, marveling, “Is Allan risen frae the deid?”, Fergusson was no resurrected throwback, nor some kind of Caledonian Chatterton, but a fully contemporary writer engaged with the living reality of the city.
There is a joyously cocksure quality to his poetry. He cheekily rhymes Sir Isaac Newton with “snout on” and “dout on,” forcing the English physicist into an armlock with Scottish pronunciation, and links “dinna fash us” with Parnassus. Samuel Johnson's visit to St. Andrews inspires him to wish that the grandees of his alma mater had dared to give “Samy” a haggis and a sheep's head rather than any imported delicacies. He flytes at Johnson in another “English” poem, claiming to
Loud encomiate thy puissant name
Eulogiated from the green decline
Of Thames's banks to Scoticanian shores,
Where Loch-lomondian liquids undulize.
Fergusson's poetry evokes the smells and stinks of Edinburgh, its City Guard and foppish macaronis, the gormandizing in oyster bars and the clanging of the Tron Kirk bell. In more somber moments, perhaps indicative of his impending crisis, he paraphrases Job and pens a Villonesque last testament. His immersion in the city's glorious chaos came at a cost.
But what of the hypothetical alternative Fergusson? We can imagine him at least completing his most exuberant topographical Edinburgh work, “Auld Reikie,” of which only a single canto survives. Robert Burns, rather than writing an elegy for his “elder brother in the Muse” and paying to put up a gravestone in the Canongate kirkyard, would meet the man himself in 1786. Burns, more rural, yet more adept at using irony to create characters in his poetry, might have learned much from Fergusson's dizzying cityscapes and linguistic high jinks; Fergusson likewise might have introduced more of a range of emotions, and more of a narrative impulse. In 1788, he would see his friend the respectable Deacon Brodie unmasked as a notorious, nocturnal thief, and hanged on the gallows: such a potent story might well have suited Fergusson's long-frustrated desire to write drama. His early attempt, the two acts of a tragedy entitled
William Wallace,
might not have been burned, but neither might they be taken up again, in the light of a more theatrical, urban tale to tell.
In 1796, the middle-aged Fergusson would write his own elegy to the younger Burns; and, as he approached sixty, would discuss the relative merits of Scott and Hogg, the rising stars of a new generation. He might even be tempted to write a novel himself. He might have done much more in an alternative, kinder universe. In this one, however, we must be content with the brief, all too parochial magnificence he did achieve.
James Hogg
{1770â1835}
SIR WALTER SCOTT died a protracted, painful death. He was trepanned, doped with opium, and still screamed for hours on end; his seemingly lucid moments relapsed into snatches of Shakespeare and incoherent whining. Crippled by successive strokes and exhausted through writing himself out of bankruptcy, he finally died at half-past one in the afternoon, on September 21, 1832.
Two weeks later, his son-in-law and future biographer, John Gibson Lockhart, received an unexpected epistle from James Hogg. Scott and Hogg had met when Scott was compiling his first notable work,
The
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,
for which Hogg was able to supply the traditional ballads he had learned from his mother. Encouraged by Scott, Hogg had gone on to become a poet, magazine editor, novelist, and anthologist of Jacobite lyrics. In addition to his writing, he had achieved an ambiguous celebrity by being written about. As “the Ettrick Shepherd” in John Lockhart and John Wilson's long-running
Noctes
Ambrosianae,
a persona was foisted on himâthat of an uncouth, couthie rustic bard, an unpolished genius, Yarrow's own Falstaff.
Hogg's letter began:
My dear Lockhart
Having been disappointed in seeing you at Kaeside which I hardly expected to do considering the confusion and distress you were in yet I cannot help writing to you thus early as I find that now having lost the best and most steady friend that I ever had in the world I have none to depend on for advice or assistance but yourself.
If Lockhart was presuming that the rest of the letter would be a plea for pecuniary help or editorial guidance, he was about to be supremely surprised.
I am thus going to begin by giving you a piece of advice. It is âThat you will write Sir Walter's life in my name and in my manner'.
Lockhart had spent his life preparing to write his father-in-law's biography. Suggesting the ghostwritten “Life of Sir Walter Scott by his friend, the Ettrick Shepherd, Mr. James Hogg” to Lockhart was a grave miscalculation.
Hogg laid out his reasons for this ambitious impersonation. Lockhart had “command of the documents,” but “for a son brother or husband to write an original and interesting biography is impossible.” If Lockhart adopts Hogg's “forthright egotistical stile” (which, of course, countless issues of
Blackwood's
proved he readily could), then “it will give you ten times more freedom of expression both as a critic and as a friend,” and, by the by, Hogg had already promised some publishers that he would write a Life of Sir Walter.
The scheme was not as outwardly outrageous as might be thought. Authorship in the early nineteenth century was a game of smoke and mirrors. Scott's Waverley novels had appeared anonymously, and speculation ran wild as to who the author was. “Scott, or the Devil” was Maria Edgeworth's assessment. Hogg's own
Private Memoirs and Confessions of
a Justified Sinner
presented itself as a genuine seventeenth-century document, edited by a nineteenth-century writer. Hogg himself appears in the last pages. He hid himself in his own text, and rumors abounded, abetted by Hogg, that Lockhart was the editor. One of Hogg's proposals was to “collect a poem from every living author and publish them in a neat volume, by which I calculated I might make my fortune.” When Byron's submission never arrived, and Scott (who probably wondered why Hogg should profit from other people's industry) refused outright, the entrepreneurial James just sat down and wrote new works by these authors, with nary a second thought about permission, legality, or decorum. The resulting volume of parodies,
The Poetic Mirror,
is a small gem.
Lockhart declined to have anything to do with Hogg's biographical masquerade. “The man is no more qualified to delineate the intellectual character of the illustrious giant of modern literature than he is able to build a bridge of goats across the Hellespont,” he complained to friends.
When Hogg's
The Domestic Manners and Private Life of Sir Walter
Scott
appeared in 1834, Lockhart may have wished that on this occasion he had taken a more conciliatory stance. The ghostwritten volume would at least have constrained Hogg within Lockhart's judgments.
The
Domestic Manners
was a very different volume. Thirty years of suppressed anger erupted in the work. Hogg had written under the stifling shadow of Scott, and the aristocratic Sir Walter had queered the pitch for the heav'n-taught Hogg. His novel about the Covenanters,
The Brownie
of Bodsbeck,
had been dismissed as an imitation of Scott's
The Tale of Old
Mortality,
even though, Hogg claims, Scott knew he was working on a story set in that period before he began his. Scott had criticized the plot of
The Three Perils of Man,
then plagiarized it for his own
Castle Dangerous.
Hogg may not have known that one English work of fiction,
Scotch
Novel Reading
by Sarah Green (a witty Don Quixote in tartan), had suggested that “James Hogg” might be another pseudonym of “The Great Unknown,” Sir Walter. If he did know, he kept remarkably quiet.
Hogg, the Ishmael to Scott's Isaac, the Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote, the ineffectual doppelgänger and genetically frayed clone, exploded. Scott's antiquarianism was amateur. He was a lickspittle Tory, fawning on the upper classes. His famous equanimity was a pose; indeed, when the critic Francis Jeffrey read his review of Scott's
Marmion
to him during a boating trip, Scott had threatened to drown them both if the critique were not emended. Hogg dropped dark hints about the illegitimacy of Scott's French wife, and recorded that he seemed like a drunk man in his final illness. As for Lockhart, he had never told the truth in his life.
Lockhart, whose notoriously acidic reviews had led Hogg to christen him “the Scorpion,” retorted in kind. He stripped Hogg of any claims to genius and bestowed them instead on his editor. “In Wilson's hands the Shepherd will always be delightful; but of the fellow himself I can scarcely express my contemptuous pity,” he wrote. Lockhart's official life appeared in 1838, three years after Hogg's death. Lockhart gave his father-in-law a peaceful deathbed benediction and the derring-do history of Charlotte Scott's parents in the French Revolution. But the book contained a final, furious sting at Hogg: “it had been better for his fame had his end been of earlier date, for he did not follow his best benefactor until he had insulted his dust.”
Later writers would be less impressed by Lockhart's mixture of tact and venom: D. H. Lawrence wrote, “Those damned middle class Lock-harts grew lilies of the valley up their arses to hear them talk.” One doubts whether Lockhart impersonating Hogg would have been any less piously reverential, or whether Hogg's work on Scott could ever transcend his sense of inferiority.
Sir Walter Scott
{1771â1832}
EVEN BEFORE HIS bankruptcy demanded it, Sir Walter Scott was an immensely productive writer. Since
Waverley
appeared anonymously in 1814, he had released at least a novel a year, and managed a whole three in 1823, as well as innumerable articles, occasional poems, and plays. He consistently refused to acknowledge his authorship of the series, and the press coined such sobriquets as “The Great Unknown,” “The Author of
Waverley,
” and “The Wizard of the North” to identify the novelist.
Scott joined in the game: the novels usually opened with a tongue-in-cheek account of how the manuscript had been found, how the Author of
Waverley
had only edited it, or translated it, or tidied it up for publication.
Ivanhoe,
for example, was supposedly based on an Anglo-Saxon source in the possession of Sir Arthur Wardour, a character in
The Antiquary;
other phantom authors such as Jedediah Cleishbotham, Captain Clutterbuck, and Dr. Dryasdust peopled the prefaces.
Scott brought these personae together in the preface to
The Betrothed.
Jonathon Oldbuckâthe antiquary in
The Antiquaryâ
called the meeting to order:
Gentlemen, I need scarcely remind you, that we have a joint interest in the valuable property which has accumulated under our common labours. While the public have been idly engaged in ascribing to one individual or another the immense mass of various matter, which the labours of many had accumulated, you, gentlemen, well know, that every person in this numerous assembly has had his share in the honours and profits of our common success. It is, indeed, to me a mystery, how the sharp-sighted could suppose so huge a mass of sense and nonsense, jest and earnest, humorous and pathetic, good, bad, and indifferent, amounting to scores of volumes, could be the work of one hand, when we know the doctrine so well laid down by the immortal Adam Smith, concerning the division of labour.
One strategy for writing off the £120,000 in debt that Scott had accumulated was a definitive edition of his work, where he openly admitted authorship and provided autobiographical introductions to his voluminous oeuvre. The so-called Magnum Opus edition, along with a
Life of
Napoleon
and other new novels, would, with luck, restore his finances. Ill health and nervous exhaustion, however, contributed to another economic principle that worked in tandem with his industrious endeavors: the law of diminishing returns.
In the 1830s, Scott's novels were declining in quality.
Count Robert of
Paris
had been not only corrected, but substantially rewritten by Scott's son-in-law, John Gibson Lockhart. A series of strokes had further impeded Scott's abilities; a “cloudiness of words and arrangement” necessitated the use of an amanuensis. When his health became ever more precarious, it was decided that a trip to the milder climes of Malta might assist in his recuperation.
Even though he was supposed to rest, and the final volumes of the Magnum were at the printers, Scott nonetheless embarked on a series of new works. As if addicted to the act of writing, and having to rely on his own unsteady penmanship, he began another novel. “No persuasion could arrest him,” says Lockhart, as he commenced a work based on a “history of the Neapolitan banditti, and covered many quires with chapter after chapter of a romance connected with the Knights of St. John.”
John Buchan, in his own life of Sir Walter Scott, discusses
The Siege
of Malta
and
Il Bizarro,
as the works were called: “Both are still extant in manuscript, but it may be hoped that no literary resurrectionist will ever be guilty of the crime of giving them to the world.” Lockhart, who received the new works in installments, lamented that “The MS . . . is hardly to be deciphered with any effort.” Neither is wholly telling the truth.
The manuscript is not completely extant, as various pages have been excised by souvenir hunters. Neither is it utterly illegible, although Scott's celerity means that many pronouns, conjunctions, and prepositions are omitted; and his infirm handwriting renders the transcription of certain passages speculative at best. As usual with his drafts, there is hardly any punctuation, which Scott relied on the printers to supply.
The work itself is a ghost book: Scott was, if not technically, then artistically dead, and
The Siege of Malta
is a prose poltergeist, lingering in the world of the living. There are flashes of the old Scott witâsuch as the suggestion that Miguel de Cervantes, with his honorable track record against the Moor, might join the defenders in Malta and entertain them in the evening. But as a whole, each line is written as if with no memory of the last, trapped in a perpetual present. The reader is introduced to Don Manuel de Vilhenya, an old-school chivalric knight, and his niece Angelica, who disappears from the narrative shortly after the opening. He has a flagged-up feud with Dragut, the corsair and viceroy of Algiers, yet their expected duel never materializes. It dwindles out, with even the main character slowly evaporating from the plot. James Skene compared Scott's pen to the staff of the seventeenth-century sorcerer Major Weir (about whom Scott had once planned a novel), which could move independently of its master. The necromantic comparison is uncannily correct.
Yet Scott thought it equal to
Ivanhoe.
He burned the opening and rewrote it, and intended to accompany it with a poem about St. George and a dragon of Rhodes, the former residence of the Knights of St. John, having seen his friend William Gell's sketch of a dinosaur skeleton embedded in the roof of a church. A travel book about Malta was promised, but never delivered. Hints that his mental health was none too sound can be seen in his behavior before leaving England. His fears about the Reform Bill and the rumor that the Whig government might make the FitzClarences the legitimate heirs to the throne spurred him into conceiving a plan for the kidnapping of Princess Victoria, securing her protection in Scotland, and installing Wellington as dictator.
Scott had hoped to visit Goethe on their homeward journey; however, when he heard that Goethe had died, it strengthened his own desire to return, so that he too should die at home. On July 11 he reached Abbots-ford, and died two months later, safe in the knowledge that the forthcoming
Siege of Malta
was in the capable hands of his son-in-law and publisher.