The Missing Phoenix

As soon as I finished my last post I hauled down my copy of V. S. Pritchett's massive Collected Essays to see what if anything Pritchett had to say about Jonathan Wild. I soon discovered that not only had he anticipated (and amplified) much of my argument but that he had even used essentially the same title: "An Anatomy of Greatness." Since his piece was included in a collection published in 1942, the parallels he found between Fielding's criminal "Great Man" and modern political sociopaths focused on a different generation, but the underlying idea was the same.

There's no shame in ceding priority to Sir Victor, but the end of his essay held a surprise.

Mrs Heartfree's sea adventures, in which there is hardly a moment between Holland and Africa in which she is not on the point of losing her honour, are not so much padding but give a touch of spirit to her shopkeeping virtues and also serve the purpose of satirizing the literature of travel. It is hard on Mrs Heartfree; perhaps Fielding was insensitive.

All well and good, until Pritchett goes on:

Without that insensitivity we should have missed the adventure with the monster who was 'as large as Windsor Castle'; an episode which reminds us that the spirit of the nine o'clock news was already born in the 1700s:

I take it to be the strangest Instance of that Intrepidity, so justly remarked in our Seamen, which can be found on Record. In a Wood then, one of our Mucketeers [sic] coming up to the Beast, as he lay on the Ground and with his Mouth wide open, marched directly down his Throat.

He had gone down to shoot the Monster in the heart. And we should have missed another entrancing sight. Mrs Heartfree perceived a fire in the desert and thought at first she was approaching human habitation.

... but on nearer Approach, we perceived a very Beautiful Bird just expiring in the flames. This was none other than the celebrated Phoenix.

The sailors threw it back into the Fire so that it 'might follow its own Method of propagating its Species'.

My reaction to this was bafflement. Had I read Jonathan Wild so carelessly that I had breezed past a Monster and a Phoenix? Was V. S. Pritchett even reading the same book? As it turns out, he wasn't, exactly. The earliest version of Jonathan Wild was in a 1743 collection entitled Miscellanies. According to Fielding scholar Peter Jan de Voogd, the colorful chapter that described the Monster and the Phoenix was included in that edition, but Fielding apparently later decided it was too farfetched and left it out of a 1754 reprint. My Hamish Hamilton edition from 1947 followed the later version; Pritchett read the original text.

Anatomy of "Greatness"*

Henry Fielding's novel Jonathan Wild bears the full title The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great. It may at first seem puzzling that Fielding uses the word "Great" to refer to his antihero, who is a pickpocket, gangster, and all-around scoundrel, but lest anyone miss the point he includes the word GREAT or GREATNESS (in all caps) in at least sixteen chapter titles: "An adventure where Wild, in the division of the booty, exhibits an astonishing instance of GREATNESS" and "Wild proceeds in the highest consummation of GREATNESS" (the latter is where he is hanged), and so on. Fielding's narrator makes it clear that Wild's "greatness" consists largely of limitless ambition and a total absence of scruples, and he contrasts it pointedly with "goodness," which Wild lacks utterly. The two qualties are, in fact, held to be incompatible. Wild's foil is the honest merchant Heartfree. Duped and swindled by Wild, Heartfree almost ends up on the scaffold, and the narrator makes it clear that he is utterly without "greatness." He refuses when given the opportunity to escape, because doing so might require the death of one or more of his guards. To Wild, this is nothing but contemptible weakness.

All of this is, of course, highly ironic, and Wild, though based on a notorious criminal whose doings also inspired Defoe and John Gay, is generally considered to be a stand-in for Robert Walpole, the long-serving poltical leader who is counted as Britain's first prime minister. Whether Fielding's satirical depiction of Walpole's character is fair is questionable, but Walpole was at the time widely regarded, or mocked, as "a Great Man" and was not particularly known for possessing scruples. Today, when our public sociopaths openly pride themselves on their lack of concern for those whom they destroy, the figure of Wild seems at least as relevant as it was in the eighteenth century.

There are traces in the novel of a different kind of narrative: the nautical picaresque of Defoe and Smollett. In one puzzling chapter, Fielding sends Wild off to the Americas for a period of seven or eight years. What happens there isn't described, and when Wild returns it's as if he's just gone to the corner for a quart of milk. A more fully developed episode involves Heartfree's virtuous wife. Spirited abroad by Wild under false pretenses, she escapes rape at his hands, but her supposed rescuer, a French sea captain, proves only to be the next in a chain of attempted seducers. She survives a shipwreck on the coast of Africa and is saved from the advances of another rake by a kindly, half-naked hermit who then, naturally, throws himself at her feet. Eventually she makes it safely home.

* Update: After posting this I discovered that V. S. Pritchett has anticipated my title. More on that next time.

The Bruiser (Hogarth)

William Hogarth's satirical engravings often commented on social issues like gin drinking, popular credulity, and misguided marriages, but he tended to avoid involving himself in factional political disputes. The oddly adorable image above, which depicts the poet and former curate Charles Churchill, is the outgrowth of a rare exception. In 1762, Hogarth issued an allegorical street scene entitled The Times, Plate 1, in which the central figure was a firefighter (taken to be the Tory statesman John Stuart, the third Earl of Bute) who was struggling to extinguish the fires of the Seven Years War while being harrassed by members of a war party including, among others, figures presumed to represent the radical parliamentarian John Wilkes and Churchill, his close ally. Both of the latter were acquaintances of Hogarth's and had formerly been on good terms with him. When Wilkes blasted the artist in the pages of his periodical The North Briton, Hogarth produced a vicious caricature of him as a sinister, smirking rabble-rouser with a suggestion of devil's horns. (Hogarth, who had strong ideas about the use of the word "caricature," may have regarded it as more of a study of character.)

Hogarth was eventually to tire of the squabble and lose his enthusiasm for the faction surrounding the Earl of Bute, but the damage was done. Churchill penned a damning poetic Epistle to William Hogarth that publicly assaulted both his character and his career as an artist. Though he was fair-minded enough to admit the merits of Hogarth's earlier engravings ("HOGARTH unrivall'd stands, and shall engage / Unrivall'd praise to the most distant age") he characterized the man as "weak and vain" and as a has-been.

Hogarth's response to Churchill's dressing-down was ingenious but not without a touch of the bizarre. Rather than go to the trouble of engraving an image of Churchill comparable to the one he had made of Wilkes, he took out an old plate that he had used years earlier to create a self-portrait (below).

Hogarth then effaced his own likeness, mocked Churchill as a drunken bear with tattered clerical vestments, and added a copy of the Epistle, onto which the pug (a breed Hogarth favored) is now, in a characteristic Hogarthian touch, issuing a stream of urine. In later states of the plate (as shown at top) he replaced the palette with a miniature scene including Churchill as a dancing bear and Wilkes as a monkey.

In the words of Hogarth biographer Jenny Uglow,

It was an extraodinary act, to replace his own face with that of the man who had tried to destroy him, especially when he produced such a strong, powerful, almost attractive image. To some it might seem less of a revenge than an unconscious surrender: a suicide, even. In the midst of his anger, Churchill saw this. 'I take it for granted You have seen Hogarth's print — was ever anything so contemptible,' he wrote to Wilkes, '—I think he is fairly Felo de se.'

Nevertheless, the portrayal of Churchill as The Bruiser was popular and the engraving sold well. Time was running out, however; Hogarth died on October 26, 1764. The much younger and alcoholic Churchill, in exile in France, died just nine days later.

Jenny Uglow's Hogarth: A Life and a World admirably combines art history with a good overview of the social and political background of the very lively environment in which the artist worked. For larger illustrations (always a plus, in an artist who excelled at detail) a volume like Dover's Engravings by Hogarth is indispensable.

Special Delivery

Archipelago Books in Brooklyn has announced, in its latest catalog, the forthcoming publication of a new translation by Bill Johnston of a short novel from 1933 by the French writer Roger Martin du Gard. The Mail Carrier is the gender-neutral replacement for the title employed in the previous translation (by the art critic John Russell), which was The Postman. While the new title strikes me as a bit anachronistic in tone for a book set in rural France between the wars, the original French title is actually Vieille France, which literally means "Old France" but carries cultural baggage that doesn't come across in English (compare to our loaded term "Middle America").

As it happens, Vieille France was the first book I ever read from cover to cover in French. I didn't actually know all that much French at the time, but I couldn't find a copy of The Postman, which was out of print, and which seemed the logical next step after reading The Thibaults and Jean Barois in English. I don't have my copy of the French edition anymore, but I remember slowly making my way through with the aid of a dictionary and a pencil to write in the English equivalents of the (many) words I didn't know. As I recall, the novel was pretty slight, but I did make it through to the end (and eventually my French got better). Years later I stumbled across this mass-market edition of The Postman, which attempted to capitalize on the popularity of a certain notorious American novel.


The far classier cover art that Archipelago has come up with includes a hedgehog by Albrecht Dürer. The book has been announced for April 2027. Perhaps there's hope now that someone will undertake a new translation of Les Thibaults, since the existing one, by Stuart Gilbert, is dated and unsatisfactory.

Notebook: Albatross

John Livingston Lowes:

The size of the albatross ... has long been a stone of stumbling to matter-of-fact souls, who protest that Coleridge has strained verisimilitude to the breaking point through his patent misconception of the albatross's size. For he has suspended about a sailor's neck a bird the sweep of whose regal wings was twice a tall man's height, and, in the poem as it originally stood, has fed the Brobdingnagian creature "biscuit worms," as if it had the tastes and the dimensions of a wren... One may admit at once the piquant incongruity of the biscuit worms, which were promptly banished from the poem. As for the rest, Coleridge was intent upon poetic truth, not ornithological fact. But even a poet may be presumed to know that size is a matter of species and age, and the sooty albatross, which is much the smaller bird, might readily enough, as I know from experiment, have been carried suspended from a sailor's neck.

The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (emphasis added)

I often return to this 1927 study of the making of "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," though I'm not sure that I've ever read it cover-to-cover. My Vintage Books paperback copy is now in pieces crudely taped together, but I haven't gotten around to replacing it. Lowes is such an engaging and enthusiastic writer (not to mention such an erudite scholar), that one can just open the book anywhere and start reading, as in the passage above, which inescapably creates a mental image of Professor Lowes in some dusty back room in a natural history museum trying on a taxidermied albatross for size.

Notebook: Coleridge's Glosses

Most editions of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" published today include Coleridge's marginal glosses, which have come to be seen as an intrinsic part of the poem, though they weren't part of the first printed version (in Lyrical Ballads, 1798). Coleridge tinkered with the text of the poem repeatedly over the years, and by the time of its inclusion in his 1817 collection Sibylline Leaves it had acquired a set of notes by the author, presumably intended as exegesis, the form of which, according to John Livingston Lowes, Coleridge may have borrowed from glosses in some of the narratives of exploration that he was fond of reading. Arguably these glosses aren't "necessary" to the appreciation of the Rime, but — reason not the need — they certainly make it richer.

My favorite of these sidenotes is a sentence so lovely it can stand on its own:

In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected, and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.

You can feel the wild onrush of Coleridge's mind here, as he adds clause after clause until the Moon and stars are all but absorbed by the metaphor and the syntax finally comes a bit unmoored at the very end. There is little to prompt any of this in the stanzas it was meant to accompany, which come after the mariner has shot the albatross and the rest of the crew have died:

The moving Moon went up the sky,
And no where did abide:
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside --

Her beams bemocked the sultry main,
Like April hoar-frost spread;
But where the ship's huge shadow lay,
The charmed water burnt alway
A still and awful red.

There's no "yearning" in those stanzas, and the simple lines about the Moon and the stars provide little foundation for the elaborate imagery of the gloss, but the Rime is fuller for the addition. The same mind that could conceive — but not "finish" — "Kubla Khan" is here seen moving ever outward, finding more and more connections as it weaves of the universe a fabric that can never be completed.

The Prehistory of the Bear

I've been re-reading Rafi Zabor's great jazz novel The Bear Comes Home again, so out of curiosity I decided to see what I could find out about the original serialization of parts of the book. Zabor was a contributor of reviews and articles to the (now defunct) magazine called Musician, which in its November 1979 issue ran the first installment of his work-in-progress about a talking and jazz-playing ursine. The last installment appeared one year later, at which point a note was appended indicating that "a full novel is intended... and we'll keep you posted." As it turns out, that "full novel" wouldn't appear for another seventeen years.

As it happens, PDFs of most of the serialization are available on the World Radio History website (a few pages of one chapter seem to be missing) and I've made JPEGs of four of the opening pages. It's amusing that the editors used as an illustration a mock-up of a (fictional) article from the Village Voice that is referred to in the text.

Although the novel seems to cover a time period of only a few months or maybe a year or two, the musicologist Tim Storhoff has noted that technologies are described in the final version, published by W. W. Norton in 1997, that either didn't exist in 1979-1980 or hadn't yet become commonplace: compact discs, for example, and laptop computers. (The bear, in the book's first sentence, dances on the sidewalk to "a disco cassette.") In addition, living figures who appear as characters in the opening chapters died during the writing process, notably the drummer Steve McCall, whose death (in 1989) was incorporated into the Norton edition.

Much of the Musician text made it into the final version substantially unchanged, but there is at least one section, involving a talking lion, that was cut (perhaps wisely). I'm electing not to read it, but it's there for the curious.

Girls on the Bridge (Derek Mahon)

I found a copy of this chapbook on the giveaway shelf in our local library and brought it home, knowing only that the author, Derek Mahon, was a modern Irish poet of good reputation. It was published by Gallery Books in Dublin in 1981.

Mahon, who died in 2020, presents some initial difficulties for the American reader, for anyone, that is, to whom the names Rathlin Island or Roscoff mean as little as they did to me. If Mahon drops the name of Somhairle Buidh (as he spells it) into a poem (as he does), he's not going to gloss it for the uninitiated. But the poems repay the trouble. Several of the best (and most accessible) of them are responses to paintings by Pieter de Hooch (in the title poem), Paolo Uccello, and Edvard Munch. The last is represented by a scene of several girls standing on a bridge, which could be any of a number of canvases the artist created on the same theme, perhaps the one below.

Here are the first three stanzas:

Audible trout,
Bound to be midges. Beds,
Lamplight and crisp linen, wait
In the house there for the sedate
Limbs and averted heads
Of the girls out

Late on the bridge.
The dusty road that slopes
Past is perhaps the high road south,
A symbol of world-wondering youth,
Of adolescent hopes
And privileges;

But stops to find
The girls content to gaze
At the unplumbed, reflective lake,
Their plangent conversational quack
Expressive of calm days
And peace of mind.