Say It Isn't So, Sam

...Thus Fruman's study, despite its staggering disclosure of Coleridge's fraud, does not demolish the man...

...No figure in English literature has been more thoroughly studied than Coleridge, Fruman contends, yet ignorance and misconception about him prevail...

...To be sure, Coleridge's habitual and wholesale borrowings are something else...

...In those years Coleridge, unaware of what his real, underlying subject was, charged his poems "with the tension and turbulence of his own chaotic inner life, a nightmare realm normally screened not only from others, but from himself...

...Reviewed by Edward T. Chase Editor, New American Library How our revisionist historians would envy Norman Fruman's accomplishment...

...In Coleridge's case, much that is taken for ordinary fact about his life is false, and the detailed image of his character, mind, and art that has emerged from the tremendous surge of scholarly and critical studies of the past half-century is seriously askew...

...Many who have written confidently about Coleridge's mind and contributions are dismayingly ignorant not only of the issues but of the evidence that clamors to be considered...

...Repeatedly Coleridge asserted he had dashed off poems in his youth (he shamelessly contrived an image of himself as a Wunder-kind) or "just the other day...

...Perhaps Fruman's most original accomplishment is to explain, through an intensive scrutiny of Coleridge's childhood and dream life, why his poetic genius was fully realized solely in the brief, miraculous period 1797-98...

...Fruman takes his title from an August 26, 1816, letter by Charles Lamb to William Wordsworth, in which Lamb comments on Coleridge's decline and a critical episode in his bout with opium addiction...

...Fruman addresses himself to each of these topics not seriatim but as a by-product of his exhaustive examination of the research on Samuel Taylor Coleridge's life and work...

...As Fruman demonstrates, Coleridge was unique in his role as the inadvertent conveyor of German expression at the turn of the century...

...Not only did he write some very great poetry??The Ancient Mariner," "Kubla Khan," "Christabel," "Frost at Midnight," "Ode to Dejection"??but he was also an exhilarating critic and vital purveyor of ideas, among them his extraordinary formulations of the imagination, organic unity, and the dynamics of the creative process (the last patently filched from the German philosophers...

...He compounded his guilt by savaging other writers, usually innocent ones, for his own failing...

...In Fruman's judgment, and this reader's, Coleridge nearly survives...

...For all his problems, Lamb observes, Coleridge "wonderfully picks up another day, and his face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory, an Archangel a little damaged...

...All literature, though not so incremental in its historic evolution as science, represents the reworking, hopefully inspired, of the race's recorded reactions to human experience...

...modern scholarship, however, proves they were all too often thefts from German or obscure English sources, and were laboriously adapted by Coleridge at a later date than claimed...

...And translations of contemporary German work were sparse and slow to appear in Britain, the McLuhanist age of instant communication being 150 years in the future...

...With a single stroke (of some 200,000 words) he may well have forced an irreversible change in English literary history: His book challenges received opinion about the origins of the Romantic movement, the worth of its ideas, the ranking of its stars, the emerging cultural pattern of the 19th century, the relationship between 18th-century England and the Continent, and, indeed, the very nature of the creative process...

...Fruman convincingly shows Coleridge to have been a liar, a plagiarist, a malicious accuser, a wholly disturbed man...

...it brings him to us whole, and we perceive more knowingly and more justly how great this troubled genius was...

...His proof of Coleridge's charlatanism, only fitfully alleged on so grand a scale heretofore, calls into question both the primacy and the validity of the English Romantic achievement...

...What is more, Fruman notes, "the checks and balances inherent in the concept of an international community of scholars, so crucial in the sciences, cannot readily be said to exist in the disciplines of the modern languages and literature, though the contrary is assumed with a casual-ness that can be startling...

...Focusing particularly upon the origins of and antecedents to the writings, he has produced a compelling polemic, tough but fair...

...By establishing that Coleridge was "incalculably the greatest mediating figure" between English and German culture during the Romantic period, Fruman performs the valuable service of emphasizing the quality of early 19th-century German thought, particularly the Shakespearian criticism of Schlegel and the esthetic theories of both Schlegel and Schelling...

...Coleridge guilefully misled his contemporaries by making trivial or irrelevant acknowledgments of his sources while maintaining silence about lengthy and at times verbatim plagiarisms...

...But Fruman is at his best in analyzing Coleridge's psychological makeup??the unbearable nightmares, the mind-destroying despair of his impotence and horror at his latent homosexuality (the impetus for the "Ode to Dejection...

...The section on Coleridge's theft from Schelling in the Biographia Literaria is masterful...

...His notorious though still vastly underestimated debt to the Germans??especially A. W. Schlegel, F. W. J. Schelling and J. G. E. Maass??Fruman exposes to the full...

...his stature diminished and his canon drastically reduced, he remains indisputably a genius...

...Nonetheless, one is moved to excuse Coleridge much, so utterly wretched was his childhood, so disastrous his sexual hangups, so little understood his drug addiction, all creating fearful pressures that never quite succeeded in crippling him...

...Literary scholarship is so "overwhelmingly nationalistic" that English-speaking Coleridge experts have for years ignored or downgraded the evidence of his indebtedness...

...yet frequently he managed to give new and exciting form to the ideas and feelings of the time...

...His plagiarism was altogether feasible: Few English writers who visited Germany possessed his insatiable curiosity, his omnivorous reading capacity, his facility with the language...