No Angel (Sydney Morning Herald, 27/10/2007)

Ann Wroe, Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself
Jonathan Cape; $89.95; 452pp
Janet Todd, Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle
Profile Books; $49.95; 304pp

Perhaps more than any other group of poets, the second generation of English romantics are known as much for their lives as for their work. Everyone remembers that Lord Gordon Byron was ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ – or, if not everyone, surely more people than have read his greatest poem, Don Juan. Similarly, Percy Bysshe Shelley is known as much for his torrid love life as he is for his poem, Adonais. When the two poets stayed at Lake Geneva with Mary Shelley and her step-sister Claire, a local hotelier provided telescopes so that his guests could observe their passionate shenanigans. One way or another we’ve been snooping ever since.

All this is a gift to the literary biographer, but it also brings with it certain dangers. Too facile a connection between literature and life is a frequent failing of literary biography, but in the case of the romantics it is particularly prevalent since it’s a connection made by the poets themselves. They refused to separate life and art, embracing the cult of creative genius that had grown up under European romanticism. Moreover, they felt their genius exempted them from the morality and mores of the common herd and made little effort to disguise the fact. (In the case of Shelley, atheism and utopianism combined to produce a belief in free love that caused much pain to those around him.) In attempting to relate the work to the life, and presenting the life in salacious detail, the literary biographer can easily find herself complicit in a self-dramatisation.

It is, in part, to avoid such complicity that Ann Wroe has written a new kind of biography, one that attempts to tell the story of Percy Shelley ‘from the inside out’. For in Being Shelley, the traditional priorities of literary biography have been neatly reversed. As Wroe puts it in her introduction: ‘Rather than writing the life of a man into which poetry erupts occasionally, my hope is to reconstruct the world of a poet into which earthly life keeps intruding.’ The result is a quite remarkable book, less a re-telling than a re-imagining, an act of mediation, of ventriloquism.

Though Wroe eschews neither biographical detail nor the socio-political context, the fundamental point of her book is to explore the poet’s imaginative universe. To this end, the prose reaches out to the poetry in all its (sometimes gaudy) intensity, the narrative moving backwards and forwards over Shelley’s short creative life. The book is divided into four main parts: ‘Earth’, ‘Water’, ‘Air’ and ‘Fire’, each element corresponding to elements of the poetry, which Wroe attempts to illuminate by means of a number of free-floating images: ‘Chains’, ‘Masks’, ‘The Wind’ and so on.

How the reader responds to this approach will rather depend on his view of Shelley, whose poetry is an acquired taste. In one sense, Wroe (who often writes beautifully) is a victim of her own success. Shelley had a weakness for the untethered image and Wroe’s style dutifully follows suit. For example, in ‘Chains’ (a chapter in ‘Earth’), the images of restriction accumulate to the point where they cease to carry any charge. ‘He bound himself with Harriet’s bright hair like a rope, let her smiles gild the “rivets” driven into him, and made her words and glances a cage around his heart … Throughout his Italian exile, “Duty’s chains” grew tighter and harder … If such chains could not be seen he was sure they could be heard in the heavier spondees and trochees of his verse …’ Thence to the ‘chains’ of the working poor about whom Shelley wrote so thrillingly in poems such as ‘The Masque of Anarchy’. Thence … But you get the general idea.

Moreover, and more importantly, I’m not sure Wroe has avoided the pitfalls (or elephant traps) of literary biography. For in spite of the book’s unusual style, the intentional and biographical fallacies are always ominously lurking in the wings. This is evident in her treatment of the texts, which she regards as illustrations of the life, albeit the life of the mind and the soul. Indeed, she enlists, not just the finished poems, but the drafts of (sometimes unpublished) poems, many of which have been largely crossed out. She even attempts, on a number of occasions, to intuit Shelley’s mood from his handwriting: ‘the writing almost horizontal with impatience … his pencil digging and jerking as if in paroxysms of tears … digging with the bare splintered stub, as if he had no alternative …’ But poetry is all about alternatives. It doesn’t fall, readymade, from the skies to be set down in a flurry of nightshirt and quill.

Janet Todd, in Death and the Maidens, also engages in textual analysis, though to a far lesser degree than her (acknowledged) colleague. Hers is a more traditional biography, though one with an untraditional focus. For rather than concentrate on the ‘Shelley circle’, Todd has chosen to tell the story of a figure on that circle’s periphery – a woman to whom there are just four references in Wroe’s more Shelleycentric volume.

The woman is Fanny Wollstonecraft, daughter of Mary, the celebrated feminist, and her American lover, Gilbert Imlay. Fanny was the half-sister of Mary Shelley (Shelley’s second wife and the author of Frankenstein), who, with her father, William Godwin (the author of Political Justice), undermined Fanny’s self-esteem to the point where she felt she could not go on. Subjected to countless slights and rejections, she committed suicide in 1816, having left a note from which was torn the signature identifying the corpse. No one came forward to claim the body, which was buried in a pauper’s grave.

Thus the reader is presented with a mystery: who tore off the signature, and why? Todd’s allegation is that it was most likely Shelley, acting on instructions from Godwin and Mary. Shelley, she suggests, met Fanny in Bath on the day before she killed herself and may have contributed to her decision to do so, such was his coldness towards a woman who, argues Todd, was in love with him (a pretty reasonable speculation: most women, it seems, were in love with Shelley). The following fragment is marshalled as evidence:

Her voice did quiver as we parted,
Yet knew I not that heart was broken
From which it came – and I departed –
Heeding not the words then spoken.
Misery – oh misery
This world is all too wide for thee!

On the reverse side of the original manuscript Shelley has written, somewhat guiltily, ‘It is not my fault – it is not to be attributed to me.’

I find myself in sympathy with Todd though not altogether convinced by her. For one thing, this poem may correspond to an earlier meeting between Shelley and Fanny (we know for a fact that they met in London). Todd’s general point, however, is sound. The nineteenth-century cult of genius did lead writers – and Shelley in particular – to treat those around them very badly. Indeed, she might have written a book about Harriet Shelley, the poet’s first wife, with whom he eloped in 1811 and who drowned herself in 1816, while pregnant, possibly with Shelley’s child. Throughout his life, Shelley’s friends tended to paint him as a spirit or an angel – ‘unbodied’, like his famous skylark. His nickname at Oxford was Ariel, which was also the name of the boat he was sailing when he drowned in 1822. As Shelley’s body was pulled from the water, I wonder if anyone spared a thought for those who had already gone down in his wake.

Though lionised in verse and beatified in marble, Shelley is not a sympathetic figure. His arrogance, self-regard and selfishness (this from the author of ‘Ozymandias’!) bordered, at times, on the monstrous. Nervous, weak and fanciful, his mind was a mess. But his poetry wasn’t. For all its self-pity and windy abstraction, it was technically brilliant and often moving. Shelley was no angel, but he could write like one. In the end, that is all we can ask of our poets. What we ask of our fellow human beings is a trickier proposition all round. But a bad life doesn’t invalidate good art any more than good art excuses a bad life.

Lost in Translation (Sydney Morning Herald, 29/09/2007)

Waleed Aly, People Like Us: How Arrogance is Dividing Islam and the West
Picador; $32.95; 277pp

On 11 February 2006, the Weekend Australian’s Inquirer supplement published an article by Waleed Aly on the Danish cartoons controversy. (I remember this well because, beneath it, was an article on precisely the same topic written by your humble servant.) The piece was entitled ‘Selective Outrage’ and in it the author delivered a rocket to flag-burners and ‘free speech crusaders’ alike. Noting that the West is not so wedded to freedom of speech as it likes to think, and that many newspapers in the Islamic world are just as guilty of using cartoons to reinforce offensive stereotypes (especially anti-Semitic ones) as any of the doodlers at Jyllands-Posten, Aly suggested that ‘this affair has little to do with principle. Far from being a manifest clash of civilisations, it is a clash of hypocrisies.’

This is the starting point for People Like Us, which begins by reprising the cartoons debacle and goes on to suggest that this ‘clash of hypocrisies’ is indicative of a deeper crisis – a crisis that has to do with the ways the West and Muslims regard one another. As Aly put it in his Inquirer piece, ‘the grandstanding about inviolable principles’ was a cover for ‘pre-existing prejudices [sic]’. Bigotry and ‘contrarian defensiveness’ have combined to drive a wedge between us. Islam and the West talk across each other, projecting their own assumptions in the process.

Though Aly addresses Islamic intolerance, People Like Us is overwhelmingly addressed to the West and its ‘commentariat’. ‘It all begins with words’, writes Aly, before embarking on a painstaking survey of the many and various misunderstandings that intrude upon the public discourse. For example, commentators who like to insist on the separation of Church and State as a precondition for modernisation and liberalisation in the Islamic world miss the fact that no such concept as ‘the Church’ exists within Islam. Nor should we talk about ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘moderates’ in an Islamic context, for that, too, is a Western projection. As for ‘jihad’ … don’t get him started.

Much of this is fair enough. Many commentators would indeed do well to tidy up their semantic acts, especially those (largely right-wing) commentators whom Aly singles out for criticism (Mark Steyn, Ann Coulter, Melanie Phillips). The surprise, however, is what comes next. For Aly now goes on to argue that what Muslims need is not the Enlightenment prescribed by Western intellectuals, and certainly not a Reformation, but a rebirth of classical Islamic scholarship. What Muslims need is a sort of Renaissance. ‘It is now the non-derogable duty of classically educated Islamic theologians to communicate such classical norms to Muslim populations persuasively enough to expose the nihilistic, reactionary egotism of radical ideology for the heresy it is.’

This is a deeply eccentric argument – one based on a series of impressive non sequiturs, by far the most egregious of which is the proposition that the absence of a Church from which to extricate the State makes any talk of secularism irrelevant in an Islamic context. But of course such talk is not irrelevant. The use and abuse of clerical power in countries across the Muslim world is an inescapable modern theme. Those who argue for its limitation are certainly not confined to the West.

Indeed, I think Aly underestimates the desire within the Muslim world for precisely the kind of ‘enlightenment’ that he regards as a Western projection. Those for whom religious bullying and intimidation are a fact of life are highly unlikely to be impressed by Aly’s argument that what is needed is yet more exegesis and instruction from ‘classically educated Islamic theologians’. In my view – and in my experience – those who look to Holy Books to guide them through this veil of tears are rarely predisposed to tolerance, while those for whom only one book is needful are always predisposed to violence. I don’t think I’m being an intellectual imperialist when I say that the world needs less of this, not more.

Literary Drifter (The Weekend Australian, 06/10/2007)

Ray Mathew, Tense Little Lives: Uncollected Prose of Ray Mathew
National Library of Australia; $29.95; 336pp

Ray Mathew was that familiar beast: the literary artist who shows early promise but who fails to set the world on fire. Predominantly a playwright, though also a poet, novelist, critic and short story writer, his 1958 play, A Spring Song, was well regarded in Australia and elsewhere. He published three collections of poetry and in 1960 moved to London, having won a British Arts Council bursary – the first Australian author to do so. There he published Joys of Possession, a Lawrentian novel based on his experiences as a teacher in rural New South Wales. In 1967 he moved to New York, where, having published no books in the meantime, he died in early 2002.

Since then, the National Library of Australia has mounted guard over Mathew’s reputation and the light it sheds on Australian literature from the 1940s to the 1960s. In 2005, it published Ray Mathew, a slim and highly attractive volume with the jealous subtitle, An Australian For Life. This bibliography and interview was supplemented with material from the NLA’s private Manuscripts Collection, and it is from here that Tense Little Lives – a hefty collection of fictional prose selected, edited and introduced by the poet and novelist Thomas Shapcott – draws its previously unpublished contents.

New York-based writer Kate Jennings has remarked that Mathew’s ‘primary interest was in personae. In that respect, whatever genre he wrote in, he was essentially a dramatist.’ This is a very astute observation. Some of the pieces in Tense Little Lives do have a marked dramatic quality. ‘What Ever Happened to Happy Endings?’, a madcap romance set in 1960s London, is written in the present tense and, as Shapcott notes in his preface, has ‘all the marks of a film script’. Other pieces are more subtly ‘theatrical’. On the whole, there is very little description, Mathew preferring to concentrate on the development and motivation of his characters. Take, for example, the title story, set in Sydney in the 1950s and intended as part one of a four-part novel. It describes the relationship of Janet and Brian. Here is a representative passage:

It was she who had to fit; she had always known that. He was a fixed person, grown, without possibility of change; she had had to accept that. For six months she had. Vulgarity, gambling, temper – she accepted them all as grown-up, ambitious, childish. Love. She had accepted him from the first. Even as he had taunted her with his vices during love, even when he had told her rudely what he was, what he had done, would like, he was teaching her about life.

The clipped prose is typical of Mathew’s style and is in one sense well suited to this distinctly ‘tense’ tale of sexual gratification and emotional disappointment. However, the paucity of physical description and slow disclosure of information soon begin to grate on the reader, required as he is to constantly update and revise his mental picture of the proceedings. This may be intentional, but it may also stem from a preference for theatre, in which physical description is largely unnecessary.

Having said this, it is difficult to censure pieces that are not just unpublished but incomplete. By all accounts a poor editor of his work, Mathew was a literary butterfly who flitted from one piece of writing to the next. The result was that he left the world a stack of unfinished manuscripts, some of which he may have revisited, some of which he may have abandoned. Shapcott’s decision to include material that clearly falls into the second category strikes me as especially strange. One wonders, indeed, whether publishing these pieces is not a little unfair to Mathew – if this attempt to rekindle a reputation may actually serve to undermine it.

Of his decision to leave Australia for England in 1960, Mathew said: ‘It began as a journey with a destination, but it turned into drifting.’ Regrettably, this could also be said of the pieces collected in Tense Little Lives. Taken together, they reveal a writer eager to extend his repertoire but suffering from too short a range.