Keats saga leads to America
By Christopher Benfey |
October 21, 2011, Friday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
SUPPOSE you wanted to write a novel about John Keats, everyone's favorite English Romantic poet, whose travels in "realms of gold" were purely imaginary, and who died in 1821, poor and spitting blood, at the age of 25. Faced with such narrative restrictions, you might be tempted to invent a brother who was everything that Keats was not: practical, rich, footloose, married with a child, healthy enough to reach middle age. Why not send this imaginary brother across the Atlantic to the "rank-grown forests" (as Keats wrote in his "Ode to a Nightingale") of America, Kentucky, say, and invent encounters with luminous figures like John James Audubon and giant catfish and backwoods swindlers living on "bear sandwiches greased with bear fat?" A lively correspondence between the two brothers, spiced with verses, might serve to delineate the striking differences in their situations and cast a reciprocal light on the poetry and the prairies.
The good news for Denise Gigante, an English professor at Stanford, is that Keats really did have such a brother, younger by 16 months, named George, to whom he wrote several affectionate poems and some of his finest and most confessional letters, including his bracing theory of human life as a "vale of soul-making." "Do you not see," he wrote, "how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?"
The four Keats siblings, John and George, sister Fanny, and a third brother, "star-crossed" Tom, dead of tuberculosis at 19, were all well schooled in the World of Pains. The orphaned children of a shiftless stable hand, they survived on the miserly dole of a tea merchant appointed their guardian. "The lives of these orphans," Gigante remarks, "do have the makings of fairy tale." John trained in medicine before taking up the far riskier profession of poetry; reviews of his ambitious long poem "Endymion" were so harsh that Byron cruelly joked he was "snuffed out by an article." George limped along as a clerk in various mercantile firms, dreaming of something more adventurous.
Gigante has had the clever idea of telling the stories of John and George as parallel lives, a dual biography of brothers. Of course, no single achievement of George's matches John's in any imaginable way. These aren't the versatile James brothers, William and Henry, or the collaborating Grimms or Wrights. John wrote a dozen of the finest lyrics in the English language, including the great odes on the Grecian urn and the nightingale and melancholy, which arrived in a sustained flurry during the spring of 1819. And George? George built a steampowered sawmill near Beargrass Creek in Louisville.
With a nod to her "spiritual father" Harold Bloom, Gigante claims nevertheless that "the Cockney Pioneer deserves a place next to the Cockney Poet in the visionary company of Romanticism." In her view, George's departure to America with his young wife, Georgiana, was "an imaginative leap across 4,000 miles onto the tabula rasa of the American dream." And yet, nothing - nothing, that is, beyond his famous brother - distinguishes George from thousands of other immigrants who joined in the Western migration during the tough years following the French Revolution, when it became painfully clear that possibilities for advancement in Great Britain were curtailed.
The challenge for Gigante is to give sufficiently rich detail concerning George's travels in America to outweigh the conspicuous achievement gap between the two brothers. Mostly, she succeeds brilliantly. The American wilderness, she points out, had long appealed to English poets, as a land of utopian social possibility and sublime natural imagery. Coleridge and Robert Southey had dreamed of settling on the banks of the Susquehanna; Coleridge had borrowed details for his opium-inspired "Kubla Khan" from travelers' descriptions of mighty fountains and meandering rivers in Florida.
"Had Charles Dickens written the story of the two older Keats brothers," Gigante concludes, "George might have kept the fortune he made in America and John might have lived to marry the woman he loved." Perhaps, but surely the facts of the case are more interesting, and more consistent with the notion that hardships contribute to the making of souls.
The good news for Denise Gigante, an English professor at Stanford, is that Keats really did have such a brother, younger by 16 months, named George, to whom he wrote several affectionate poems and some of his finest and most confessional letters, including his bracing theory of human life as a "vale of soul-making." "Do you not see," he wrote, "how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?"
The four Keats siblings, John and George, sister Fanny, and a third brother, "star-crossed" Tom, dead of tuberculosis at 19, were all well schooled in the World of Pains. The orphaned children of a shiftless stable hand, they survived on the miserly dole of a tea merchant appointed their guardian. "The lives of these orphans," Gigante remarks, "do have the makings of fairy tale." John trained in medicine before taking up the far riskier profession of poetry; reviews of his ambitious long poem "Endymion" were so harsh that Byron cruelly joked he was "snuffed out by an article." George limped along as a clerk in various mercantile firms, dreaming of something more adventurous.
Gigante has had the clever idea of telling the stories of John and George as parallel lives, a dual biography of brothers. Of course, no single achievement of George's matches John's in any imaginable way. These aren't the versatile James brothers, William and Henry, or the collaborating Grimms or Wrights. John wrote a dozen of the finest lyrics in the English language, including the great odes on the Grecian urn and the nightingale and melancholy, which arrived in a sustained flurry during the spring of 1819. And George? George built a steampowered sawmill near Beargrass Creek in Louisville.
With a nod to her "spiritual father" Harold Bloom, Gigante claims nevertheless that "the Cockney Pioneer deserves a place next to the Cockney Poet in the visionary company of Romanticism." In her view, George's departure to America with his young wife, Georgiana, was "an imaginative leap across 4,000 miles onto the tabula rasa of the American dream." And yet, nothing - nothing, that is, beyond his famous brother - distinguishes George from thousands of other immigrants who joined in the Western migration during the tough years following the French Revolution, when it became painfully clear that possibilities for advancement in Great Britain were curtailed.
The challenge for Gigante is to give sufficiently rich detail concerning George's travels in America to outweigh the conspicuous achievement gap between the two brothers. Mostly, she succeeds brilliantly. The American wilderness, she points out, had long appealed to English poets, as a land of utopian social possibility and sublime natural imagery. Coleridge and Robert Southey had dreamed of settling on the banks of the Susquehanna; Coleridge had borrowed details for his opium-inspired "Kubla Khan" from travelers' descriptions of mighty fountains and meandering rivers in Florida.
"Had Charles Dickens written the story of the two older Keats brothers," Gigante concludes, "George might have kept the fortune he made in America and John might have lived to marry the woman he loved." Perhaps, but surely the facts of the case are more interesting, and more consistent with the notion that hardships contribute to the making of souls.
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