Idylls of Tennyson
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing IDYLLS OF TENNYSON BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL TWENTIETH-CENTURY critics have tended to see Alfred, Lord Tennyson as the quintessential Victorian poet: sonorously portentous, his glum...
...In Memoriam" speaks with a vulnerable, confessional frankness a contemporary poet would envy...
...Apparently it never crossed his mind that they might be gaping at a tall, eccentric figure wearing his signature outfit, a vast cloak and "wide-awake" hat...
...Right off he confesses that he finds Tennyson endearing—a truly good person and a supremely interesting poet...
...To his credit, Levi shows how Tennyson's masterpieces once seemed highly curative for a generation afraid of losing hope...
...The Monarch appears sunken in gloom?whether due to the death of Prince Albert or the tedium of the recital, it is difficult to say...
...Peter Levi's account is more selective and personal...
...Whatever revealing points are made tend to lose their impact amid the plethora of material...
...His father, the local clergyman, drank to excess and sometimes became violent...
...Only those with a taste for rehashed, familiar gossip, poorly salted with pop psychology, should spend time on this book...
...By the end of his study, Levi has convincingly demolished the tired conflation of the writer and his static King Arthur...
...his sudden death in 1833 ultimately inspired "In Memoriam.'' Tennyson seems to have felt called to be an important poet from the first...
...Despite his lack of social graces?he generally looked unwashed and rumpled, and would put his feet up on the table even on formal occasions in other people's houses—he became friends with Queen Victoria, who made him a baron in 1883...
...Did Hallam commit suicide...
...although some have done an admirable job, Tennyson remains an intriguing study...
...their subject had the good fortune to sit for some of the outstanding photographers of his day, including Oscar Rejlander, Lewis Carroll and Julia Margaret Cameron...
...Depression so afflicted the entire family that Dante Gabriel Rossetti dined out on the story of meeting a brother who introduced himself by saying, "I am Septimus, the most morbid of the Yennysons...
...The late poem "Rizpah" rails against the death penalty and mandatory sentencing...
...At Cambridge Tennyson formed lasting relationships with peers who would become prominent national figures, including future Prime Minister William Gladstone and the poet Edward Fitz Gerald, author of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam...
...One of 11 surviving children, Tennyson was born in 1809 and grew up in a country vicarage in Lincolnshire...
...We have swallowed Auden's dubious claim that "poetry makes nothing happen...
...Instead of Almighty God, Science has shown us "Nature, red in tooth and claw," proclaiming to her creatures, "I care for nothing, all may go...
...On the health issue, he calls attention to a pattern of "addictive personalities" in the family, since several of its members abused alcohol and/or drugs...
...Were the poet and his wife really estranged throughout most of a marriage usually deemed to have been happy...
...Although the poet hopes for a more beneficent deity behind the law of natural selection, he admits, So runs my dream: but what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry...
...Our cynicism diminishes our capacity to believe that they could help restore what has been lost...
...we have become the true melancholics...
...Both are well-illustrated...
...In these "the grey Magician" comes across as blind to many ordinary things, yet prophetic in his mysterious way?and when his voice falls silent Arthur's kingdom falls to pieces, because the inspiration sustaining its ideals is gone...
...Martin's, 566 pp., $30.00) by Michael Thom, and, again, Tennyson (Scribner's, 370 pp., $30.00) by Peter Levi...
...To be sure, Alfred, a heavy smoker, could also put away a goodly amount of port or champagne, as Henry James cattily noted more than once...
...Then there are Thorn's dollops of innuendo...
...As for his bond with Arthur Hal-lam, Alfred himself was fully aware of what people might be thinking...
...The most important social role we can now conceive for poets is to protest against the prevailing culture...
...A more apt parallel is drawn with Merlin, through whom Tennyson spoke in a number of his poems...
...Against the backdrop of Darwin, it probes the way we mourn in an age when the immortality of souls is uncertain...
...it might inform the legislative debates on this topic now taking place in many states...
...In 1850 he succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate, and finally married his longtime sweetheart, Emily Sellwood, whose older sister was married to one of his brothers...
...the laureate's cronies are known to have raised them too...
...there was little else he did...
...But he also brings us well-chosen anecdotes to reveal the personality behind the poems...
...He was also hypertensive...
...Auden, an admirer with reservations, wrote a typically devastating modernist characterization of Tennyson: "He had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet...
...he expressed exactly what he felt...
...Once he broke his silence, though, his success surpassed anticipation...
...they are mere teases, dangled and dropped...
...Subsequent biographers (of which there have been many) have mostly been left to reinterpret existing material...
...For the rest of his days Tennyson was treated as a kind of national treasure...
...But as we near the next millennium, interest in the fusty old Victorians has suddenly revived...
...there was little about melancholia that he didn't know...
...His second volume was trashed by critics so savagely that he stopped publishing for a decade and retreated into serious hypochondria...
...Hallam was handsome, brilliant, talented in several fields, and had a gift for galvanizing the people around him...
...Victorian readers prized his ability to put their hopes, fears and ambivalences into words...
...Alas, things worked out otherwise...
...Indeed, in addition to recent fresh studies of his verse we now have two new biographies: Tennyson (St...
...Like these young men, he belonged to the university's prestigious Apostles Society...
...Then there was Max Beerbohm's cartoon image of him: a spindly laureate flailing his arms to punctuate his reading of "In Memoriam" to a dumpy Queen Victoria...
...Writers & Writing IDYLLS OF TENNYSON BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL TWENTIETH-CENTURY critics have tended to see Alfred, Lord Tennyson as the quintessential Victorian poet: sonorously portentous, his glum patriarchal head glaring through a full beard from the frontispiece of Idylls of the King as if he were one with his boringly virtuous Arthur...
...When the poet's "Maud" appeared, one critic quipped that it could best be characterized by omitting either vowel from the title...
...Still, that can hardly account for evidence of complex nervous disorders...
...In common with many recent biographers, Thorn assumes that much about a famous subject is hidden by friends and family, and speculates as to what has been suppressed in Tennyson's case...
...The novelist seems to have been the sort who counts empty bottles at parties...
...He parades a tortuous argument involving Alfred's repressed attraction to his sister Emily, which is meant to explain both the powerful identification with Hallam and the long-deferred union (14 years) with a woman sharing that sister's name...
...And he demonstrates that it is quite possible to create a convincing portrait without getting tangled up in the unanswerable questions Thorn favors...
...Please...
...A scholar, critic and poet, Levi communicates his enthusiasm like the best of teachers, and excels in the close readings that enlighten understanding of the verse (readers will want to keep a copy handy as they follow him...
...Even W.H...
...He kept reminding everybody that his friend had been in love with a Tennyson sister, Emily...
...Unfortunately, the author's attempts to confront the Tennyson enigmas come across as trendy or weak...
...It scrutinizes every detail as if through a microscope...
...In a memorable one the laureate, walking down a London street with a little girl, chides her for attracting the stares of passersby...
...As the classicist Benjamin Jowett put it, the laureate "had the greatest insight into the world, and often in a word or a sentence would flash a light...
...Tennyson's reputation is among those being dusted off and replated to reflect present preoccupations...
...Accomplished in the traditional English stanza forms by the age of eight, he conquered classical meters as an adolescent, published a book of poems at 18, won the expected verse prizes at Cambridge, and was presumed by family and friends to be destined for early fame...
...Would that we paid attention, he might be as much a beacon for our time...
...It is difficult for even the most literary among us to comprehend how valuable Tennyson was to his contemporaries, how integral to his society...
...Nor are Thorn's theories of the libido satisfying...
...A grandson, Sir Charles, composed another in 1949...
...After his death nine years later, his son Hallam wrote the first account of his career...
...In this quatrain he not only speaks for his generation but is the herald of Wittgenstein and postmodernism...
...His essential theme, after all, was idyll—both the rapidly vanishing pastoral culture he recorded in verse, and the epic interpretation in which he grounded the struggles and concerns of his bewildering epoch...
...And while his basic story has long been available, each book does an effective job of giving dimension to his life...
...no wonder Tennyson disliked Americans...
...Levi further uncovers an often-missed Blakean side of Tennyson, a powerful outrage at social injustice that, at its best, surpasses "anything by Dickens, or Thackeray, or Engels...
...he was also the stupidest...
...Thorn's book is the more exhaustive—and exhausting—of the latest pair...
...A reader expecting these queries to have some pertinence, or at least dig up some missed dirt, will be disappointed...
...And so forth...
...Is there anything to the rumors that Tennyson trysted with Julia Margaret Cameron while his spouse was ill and hers was away...
...The secret of Tennyson's appeal as a poet and a man, Levi believes, lies in his childlike directness...
...Nevertheless, Alfred and his siblings—all of whom retained their strong regional accent—recalled their childhood days as idyllic, and this landscape infuses much of his work...
...Its leading light at the time, Arthur Hal-lam, was to prove Tennyson's most significant friend as well as the catalyst for his principal achievements later on...
...This boils down to questions concerning his medical history and "sexual identity" that are hardly new...
Vol. 77 • January 1994 • No. 1
