The Immortal Adolescent
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing THE IMMORTAL ADOLESCENT BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Even in the 18th century teenage suicide was sadly common. Thus in 1770 a certain London landlady was horrified but not...
...These two books will help fulfill that prophecy...
...Keats understood the tantalizing nature of this possibility when he wrote, "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/Are sweeter...
...Yet his death was an accident: He was trying to cure his venereal infection with a home-made remedy of arsenic and opium...
...Had he survived, Coleridge liked to think, he would have been their older brother...
...His money had run out, and he was too proud to accept her food...
...Despair over venereal disease may have been the last straw...
...She goes on to maintain that Chatterton's idealizing of a lost past was a reaction to adolescence...
...Ultimately the novel reveals that the picture is a fakeChatterton really did perish in that garret...
...Should the portrait turn out to be authentic, the implication would be that the hoaxer did not die, and that he might have continued his deceptions...
...He had swallowed arsenic...
...The august belletrist Horace Walpole made it known that he had been sent copies of some of the documents by Chatterton, and had accused the boy of forgery...
...Ironically, while he was modeling his wife fell in love with the painter and eloped with him, inspiring Meredith's famous sonnet-cycle, Modern Love...
...For them, Chatterton was the Immortal Adolescent...
...At five, he asked an uncle to "Paint me an angel with wings-and a trumpet to blow my name about...
...The Chatterton and Meredith sections of his novel therefore carry more conviction than the contemporary parts...
...In Kaplan's Freudian view, someone with Chatterton's personality "must constantly re-establish the illusion that he is not small and insignificant, that he is worthy of his mother's ambitions, and moreover that he is entitled to trick the mighty [absent or dead] father, overthrow him, and rob him of his powers...
...For some years, a controversy raged: Had Rowley been one of England's leading poets, or had Chatterton, between the ages of 14 and 16, been both a supreme writer and the perpetrator of a brilliant hoax...
...By that time, though, he had become the symbol of the misunderstood genius done in by society...
...Shelley characterized him and Keats as "the inheritors of unfulfilled renown...
...Yet for Chatterton it was especially hard, since denying the truth had become for him a device to cope with the world, the core of his identity as an impostor...
...William Wordsworth was born the year Chatterton committed suicide...
...Their mission was to compose the poetry he must have planned to write-a point Ackroyd makes us appreciate...
...Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton (Grove, 234 pp., $17.95) may turn out to be the second work of fiction about him to capture the popular imagination...
...Not about to serve up the tired psychobabble that fills so many reductive biographies, Kaplan takes as her model Freud's case history, where style and metaphor reinforce theoretical brilliance...
...That is a difficult task for anyone-witness the stormy moods of early teenage years...
...Wychwood actually becomes convinced that Chatterton wrote the poetry attributed to the later Romantics...
...His writings were based entirely on his conception of real life in the 15th century and his conviction that those olden days had been freer, less formal, more imaginative than the present was," Kaplan observes...
...Canynge was an invention of the perfect parent: generous, kind, a patron to artists...
...the Meredith/Wallis episode...
...But thereof come in the end despondency and madness...
...Coleridge came along two years later...
...Yet at the very moment the young man's inquest was taking place, an Oxford scholar was searching Bristol for him...
...Thomas Fry had heard that some remarkable old manuscripts had been found and transcribed by Chatterton...
...Other forgers soon produced counterfeit Chatterton works, muddying the record...
...As it was, his writings and his death helped them understand their own pasts and aided them in winning the sense of freedom society had denied him...
...He also began pursuing sexual adventures, and probably contracted syphilis...
...The book ends with an apotheosis, merging Chatterton's spirit with those of Meredith and Wychwood into the embodiment of Poetry...
...It was the medieval persona that released his creative powers...
...GeorgeMeredith posed as the suicide...
...Chatterton's influence remains symbolic...
...The acclaim he wanted so badly came only after his death: first as notoriety because of Fry's investigation, then as the adulation of poets...
...Ackroyd is best known as one of T. S. Eliot's biographers, and his literary style makes so many allusions to the work of others as to remind one forceably of "The Waste Land...
...Nevertheless, the mystery of his strange hoax and of his death on the verge of success continue to spark curiosity, as well as pity...
...Much of Chatterton's appeal arose from his extreme youth, his unfinished accomplishment...
...Ackroyd seems to write freely in any style except the modern-no wonder he was attracted to the Rowley hoax...
...A child enters this period of life clinging to illusions about his godlike parents, his favored status in the universe...
...A decade after he died Chatterton's story became the basis of a sensational novel entitled Love and Madness, which incorporated the poet's letters-without permission...
...She presents "imposturism" as a male adolescent disorder, comparable to anorexia in girls...
...It seemed one more case of youthful ambitions destroyed by the big city...
...Here he has braided together three tales: the suicide of the eponymous hero...
...His "antique" English cannot be deciphered without a glossary...
...Thus in 1770 a certain London landlady was horrified but not surprised to discover her 17-year-old lodger dead in his garret room...
...Maturing means giving up these illusions...
...Louise J. Kaplan, a psychologist who specializes in adolescents, has offered some plausible explanations in The Family Romance of the Impostor-Poet, Thomas Chatterton (Atheneum, 301 pp., $24.95...
...He had once written a fake Italian "gothic," The Castle of Otranto, and had to admit authorship after the book became a best seller...
...Shelley's eulogy for Keats portrayed him being greeted by Chatterton's shade...
...My name will live 300 years," Chatterton boasted...
...Rowley and the merchant-humanist Canynge became the fruits of his loving endeavor...
...From the beginning, the boy aspired to fame...
...The author succeeds in conveying the invigorating freshness of early Romanticism, the "gladness" that flourished before "despondency and madness" took over...
...As Romantics, they made the pattern of glorifying the past, then sadly relinquishing it, fundamental...
...If only he could have found a modern Canynge...
...Indeed, her critical acumen rivals her knowledge of psychology: Chatterton comes across as both troubled teenager and creative prodigy...
...He is not widely read...
...I know...
...Fry was shocked at learning the fate of the boy who had brought these treasures to light, and publicized his story throughout the literary community...
...What might they have created had they lived...
...A posthumous child, Chatterton was raised by a doting mother and sister who also idealized the dead father...
...The senior Chatterton had been a church sexton and schoolteacher given to using old documents for writing paper...
...Many citizens of Bristol unconsciously abetted Chatterton's deception, so eager were they to dream of the town's former glory...
...The notion of a bright and remote ideal that is approachable -if not attainable-through poetry was dear to Chatterton...
...The son began to pore over these as soon as he could read, copying their antique script and avidly studying history to better understand what to him was the legacy of a father he never knew...
...Incredible as the idea of a mere child producing the Rowley corpus seemed, it had to be conceded that the dialect did not really follow the rules of Middle English...
...She told the authorities that the youth's name was Thomas Chatterton, and that he had come from Bristol hoping to make his living as a journalist...
...All the yearning and all the unhappiness and all the sickness can be taken away by that vision...
...Rowley stood for the youngster himself-a poet and historian worthy of such a paragon...
...They proved that Bristol was not always a mean little manufacturing town, indeed that Rowley's patron, the merchant Sir William Canynge, had made it the foremost cultural center of England...
...And the vision is real...
...But by scolding the boy Walpole robbed him of the delight he had taken in his imaginary world, and made him feel inferior...
...Although Chatterton tried to start over again in London, he was already depressed and lonely...
...Several reviewers have upbraided Ackroyd for "inventing" this detail, but in fact it has been hypothesized before to explain the teenager's death, and Kaplan takes it seriously...
...I've seen it, and I am sick...
...He had not had much luck, though, and evidently got into some sordid sexual encounters (she refrained from reporting that one of them was with her...
...He had chosen Walpole, but the older writer saw through the hoax without acknowledging the genius behind it...
...Walpole was no stranger to imposture...
...and the (fictitious) 20th-century poet Charles Wychwood's discovery of a painting purporting to show Chatterton in middle age...
...Curiously, Chatterton's nonRowley poems were no more than the scribblings of a bright student...
...Chatterton turned from idealism to cynicism...
...He heard his works praised, fully aware that they would be scorned if it were known that they issued from the pen of a contemporary boy...
...The most enduring image has come from Henry Wallis' famous painting (reproduced on the cover of every book about the poet, including this one...
...There were histories, poems, and a play by one Thomas Rowley, a 15th-century monk whose style rivaled Chaucer in linguistic richness...
...Eventually, Chatterton's forgery was proved...
...Wordsworth called Chatterton "the marvelous Boy,/The Sleepless Soul, "and said his suicide had taught them all that "We poets, in our youth, begin in gladness...
...In Ackroyd's novel, Wychwood describes poetry as "a dream of wholeness and beauty...
...Then the plot took a twist...
...Keats dedicated "Endymion" to his memory as "the most English of poets except Shakespeare...
Vol. 71 • March 1988 • No. 5
