THE TRIUMPH OF TECHNIQUE
Taylor, Mark
THE TRIUMPH OF TECHNIQUE The Oxford Booh of literary Anecdotes Ed. by JAMES SUTHERLAND Clarendon Press, $15. MARK TAYLOR Hanged. drawn, and quartered at 18, the young poet-revolutionary left,...
...Anybody can read The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, but what can anybody do with it after that...
...mark taylor teaches in the English Department at Manhattan...
...it offers anecdotes, which is all that it claims to do, but it does not offer insights...
...But it seems to me that his story is worth recounting here because it works in a direction so precisely, so tellingly, opposite to the stories of the great, near-great, and un-great that Professor Sutherland has collected...
...so how, quickness and a funny bone being the quintessence of humanity, humanity being the quintessence of literary greatness, can he then be a great poet...
...but Eliot chose to speak about the difficulties one had in London in obtaining reliable household help these days...
...his absence from The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes is consequently unsurprising...
...It would be a pleasant irony, imitative of the Tich-borne syndrome, if the tail came to wag the dog here, if college reading lists got shaped by available anecdotes...
...Anyway, it can generously be presumed that the professors do not really need this book, that they all know well and at first hand Boswell's Life, Cibber's Lives, Chesterfield's Letters, Espinasse's Literary Recollections and Sketches, and the hundreds of other sources for the anecdotes here included...
...writers are usually, or occasionally, silly...
...The conspiracy effected, rather, the hasty end of Mary and the even hastier end of its seven participants, who were rounded up either in London or in nearby St...
...Wordsworth never was a very funny writer, never really witty in either the eighteenth- or the twentieth-century sense of that term...
...I am saying that Literary Anecdotes is in itself harmless and not to be taken seriously, and yet I find myself fretting over the possibility of some reader's saying (as some reviewers have done) that the book shows that: writers are just like the rest of us...
...This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof...
...But, then, students do need more of The Queen's Love to Cynthia than they've been getting...
...It will satisfy the interest, the natural human curosity, of most to know when and under what circumstances Disraeli was aphoristic, Joyce was proud, Blake was naked, Ada Leverson was diffident, Arnold Bennett was generous, Dryden was petty, Hume was gentle, Tennyson was taciturn, Lamb was mischievous, Mrs...
...Even his contemporaries recognized his simplicity-not, we note, his classical simplicity...
...The first instance raises no question of relevance or tact...
...A trove of (largely) innocent gossip, its contents are no worse and no better than other stores of innocent gossip: which isn't very bad, and isn't very good, and is only a little bit dangerous...
...No one has yet suggested that Literary Anecdotes is designed for the teaching establishment as a kind of highbrow Monarch Notes to the continuity of giggles, and occasional sorrows, that obtains among British literati...
...No: above all one must not imply that Literary Anecdotes has a purpose, that it points, intentionally or otherwise, toward any serious lessons...
...it is not a compendium of authorial epiphanies...
...Still, I find it at least potentially subversive...
...The Elegy isn't a bad poem (though neither can it represent quite adequately the great early age of the modern English lyric), but whatever merit one may find in the deliberate, and then fashionable, artificiality of its oxymora and antitheses, in the control of its refrain line, and perhaps even in one or two of its images seen as image instead of rhetoric ("I sought my death and found it in my womb"), the fact remains that its survival is in every degree owed to the moral edification provided by Tichborne's life...
...Or if it does, one cannot tell on the basis of this book alone where and what they are...
...We're all grateful for instant replay...
...Possibly apocryphal, the poem appeared in a miscellany a couple months after Tichborne's death, in 1586, under the sobering, legend-provoking title of "Tichborne's elegy, written with his own hand in the Tower before his execution...
...Suppose one takes, as one is invited to do, Powell's point of view...
...it is quite harmless...
...Looking for a good way to begin The Vicar of Wakefield or finish up the Waverley novels...
...For myself, I'll have to get back to Ralegh, work him into next term's syllabus, for the grand moment the "Swisser Swatter" story will afford...
...The fellow wasn't much fun...
...A man accosted me with the question-'Pray, sir, have you seen my wife pass by...
...It's a hell of a way to get back at our storytellers...
...Or consider a story that Thomas Powell tells on Wordsworth in The Living Authors of England (1849), which is included in Literary Anecdotes...
...This means that, on the one hand, the Elegy became an adjunct to history...
...for the others, the men and women who perform and declaim in Literary Anecdotes, their written words served to consecrate the events of their lives, whatever the final value (to anybody else), or even interest, of these events...
...Anyone who would really like to believe that poets are, after all, only human will probably find them, after their humanity has been amply demonstrated, to be rather less than that...
...whereupon I said, 'Why, my good friend, I didn't know till this moment that you had a wife.'" The company stared, and finding that the old bard had discharged his entire stock, burst into a roar of laughter, which the facetious Wordsworth, in his simplicity, accepted as a genuine compliment to the brilliancy of his wit...
...there are no wrong hands into which it might fall...
...He may have written it, but he hardly contracted for its publication in Verses of Praise and Joy written upon Her Majesty's Preservation, where it first appeared...
...writers aren't at all like the rest of us...
...writers spend more time eating and, especially, drinking than other people...
...It is not a large number of digested literary biographies pressed between two gold-stamped, conservative blue Clarendon covers...
...the second just might...
...Carlyle was sparkling...
...I was standing some time ago at the entrance of my cottage at Rydal Mount...
...There is nothing particularly anecdotal in the little we know of Chidiock Tichborne's life...
...I do not think,' " said Wordsworth, in the course of an after-dinner conversation on wit and humor, that "I was ever witty but once in my life...
...The book disgorges biographical trivia as Bartlett's disgorges quotations (though Literary Anecdotes will rarely serve as a reference book), and as Dr...
...A papist, and the son of a papist, Tichborne joined in the infamous Babington conspiracy, solicited (it was said) by the Jesuits in Reims, to do away with Elizabeth and rescue Mary, Queen of Scots...
...The author of The Prelude is taken care of, disposed of, put where he belongs: "Yes, it's just as I always said...
...Chidiock Tichborne...
...And any one of these conclusions-all of which, as I say, should be avoided-will be accompanied by the exclamation, "Thank God for that...
...it has not even a kissing relationship to the enterprises of, say, Richard Ellmann on Joyce, Sybille Bedford on Huxley, John Wain on Johnson...
...that T. S. Eliot was (ac-cidently revealed to be) Christian and George Eliot was wooed (properly, by Herbert Spencer, upon one knee), while George Steevens was a practical joker and Joseph Ritson, a vulnerable vegetarian, that Mahaffy could be occasionally savage whereas Savage could be only improvident...
...only a closet Calvinist would say that its fruits can be too painlessly enjoyed...
...The contents of Literary Anecdotes are interesting enough, to be sure...
...That is, to me, a great story, and its editorializing notwithstanding, I find it by no means altogether at the old bard's expense...
...Tichborne's life served to consecrate his poem, whatever the final value of that poem...
...English professors, of course, can and will mine it for little bons mots and inside stories to perk up their lectures, and since spritely lectures are ipso facto a good thing, it must follow that this academic procedure will be a good thing, also...
...This is another of a regular literary column he contributes tt these pages...
...and there is no chance that he penned the contemporary, anonymous, mean-spirited, and yet promotional "Answer to Mr...
...Tichborne's sins were, of course, egregious in Elizabethan England, and his punishment a sign of the rightful workings, and proper cooperation, of monarchy and Providence...
...One simply must not be serious about this book...
...A great desire was naturally expressed by all to know what this special drollery was...
...The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes is a kind of biographical instant replay, less a substantive presentation than a technique...
...This piece of cleverness has been credited to almost everybody, and it can offer little recompense to the shade of Samuel Foote that the misattributions usually strengthen the climax of his retort by allowing halter/principles to precede pox/mistress...
...their works...
...he could scarcely have exploited the fact, if it is a fact, that he had composed it during his last night on earth...
...It is a jolly story told about Sir Walter Relegh and one of the Queen's Maids of Honor: the yound lady's protestations of "Sir Walter" during Ralegh's (vertical) violation of her, ecstatically elide, after a few moments, into "Swisser Swatter, Swisser Swatter...
...Eliot's companion, having met him that evening for the first time, waited impatiently for the truth about the Jacobean playwrights, F. H. Bradley, The Waste Land, whatever...
...Tichborne," untruthfully telling the persona of the Elegy that "The world accounts thee not worth thinking on...
...it means, on the other, that some lives, or moments in them, have become the adjuncts of literature...
...It shows, it shows again, rather, a large number-484-of intrusively prominent moments, which look entirely too much like significant moments-as any of them may be, as some of them surely are-because they occur in no context...
...Someone tells the story-I forgot who and where...
...writers are occasionally, or usually, profound (when off duty, that is...
...corroborating evidence abounds...
...It is intriguing to know that Keats was ramping and Firbank was orchidaceous...
...Which just goes to show-what...
...For a life in every way as negatively exemplary as Tichborne's was much worth thinking on, and so his poem, which shows among other things what happens to young citizens if they misbehave, became, and has more or less remained, visible...
...Adler's 100 Great Books project disgorges ideas', there being no real difference, perhaps, other than that lives are most easily glorified, soothed, welcomed, and held in contempt...
...drawn, and quartered at 18, the young poet-revolutionary left, if anything, one poem, which remains reasonably prominent in literary history -the Elegy that begins 'My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,/My feast of joy is but a dish of pain"-and one letter, promising to meet his wife Agnes in Heaven, that concludes, "By the hand, from the Heart, of thy most lovinge Husband...
...And it is a just story that gives Samuel Foote his due: replying to the Earl of Sandwich's remark that "I think you must either die of the pox, or the halter," it was Foote who said, "That will depend upon . . . whether I embrace your lordship's mistress, or your lordship's principles...
...It's easy...
...John's Wood where, hoping to appear as resident woodsmen, they had painted their faces red...
...It would be churlish to suggest that a book designed for no right purpose can subserve any wrong one...
...But then-although one rightly may turn a page or two, chuckle or cluck, nod sagely or sympathetically, feel enlightened, and fall asleep-one must not therefore conclude anything-especially not anything about its cast of characters or (Heaven forfend...
...We'll have the writer just where we want him: way above us, way beneath us, or right with us...
...After some hesitation the old poet said -"Well, I will tell you...
...This is simply the personal commonplace book they always meant to compile, but not even professors read with pencil always in hand...
...Here it is...
...Martin Tup-per was vain, and Thackeray was not cynical...
...it's not in Literary Anecdotes-of a taxi ride with T. S. Eliot...
Vol. 102 • October 1975 • No. 16
