Henry James meets Thackeray, Trollope, Tennyson, and, best of all, Browning.

I'm midway through the one-volume condensation of Leon Edel's five-volume biography of Henry James, and it's everything I'd hoped it would be. Edel has a great eye for a quote, and the James family, copious writers of letters and notebooks and diaries, has so, so many to offer.

One of the passages I've enjoyed most thus far is this, from when Henry was a boy:

Henry remembered Mr. Emerson seated on the sofa in the rear parlor, "elegantly slim, benevolently aquiline." In the library one day he saw Mr. Thackeray who had come to America to lecture on the English humorists of the eighteenth century. Henry was dressed after the fashion of the time in a tight jacket adorned in front with a row of brass buttons; hovering near the door of the sun-filled room, he heard himself summoned by the enormous English gentleman. "Come here, little boy, and show me your extraordinary jacket." Thackeray peered through and over his spectacles alike at garment and boy. He then carefully explained to Henry that if he were to go to England he would be addressed as "Buttons."

The description of Emerson, if a bit unclear (the "benevolent" more sonorous than meaningful), is memorable, but it's of course Thackeray's gentle poking of fun at Henry that's the wonder. "Buttons"!

A few years later, in the fall of 1875, when James was thirty-three, he met Anthony Trollope during an Atlantic crossing. James was not impressed:

He was struck by his "plain persistence" in writing every day, no matter how much the ship rocked. Trollope had "a gross and repulsive face and manner, but appears bon enfant when you talk with him. But he is the dullest Briton of them all."

Not surprising that James took note of Trollope's dogged commitment to writing, given his own later ability to focus reliably on the task; still less surprising that Trollope himself cared not how much the boat rocked, if there was work to be done. I am surprised, however, to hear James describe Trollope's face as "repulsive." Not that you get a sense from photographs that Trollope was handsome, but James's adjective suggests something far worse than that.

Fortunately, James would encounter Trollope again two years later, a meeting that caused him to revise his impression:

A very good genial ordinary fellow--much better than he seemed on the steamer when I crossed with him.

That does make me want to leap to Trollope's defense: as romantic as the idea of taking a leisurely ten-day trip across the Atlantic seems any time I fold myself into an airline seat for the London flight, I do think the society--and the presumption that passengers would participate--would have driven me insane. Just when I would have been looking forward for a nice, long spell of deckside reading, suddenly I'd have to talk with the Smiths of Boston or the Joneses of Saratoga. If I were Trollope, that alone would be enough to make me a less than sparkling companion on the steamer.

James also offers an amusing portrait of Tennyson, whom he met around the same time in 1877. Edel writes, of the dinner party where the meeting took place:

James sat next but one to Tennyson, whom he described as swarthy and scraggy and less handsome than he appeared in his photograph. The Bard talked exclusively of port wine and tobacco; "he seems to know much about them, and can drink a whole bottle of port at a sitting with no incommodity."

Blimey. A few years later, James would write to his good friend Charles Eliot Norton about lunching with Tennyson,

who personally is less agreeable than his works--having a manner that is rather bad than good. But when I feel disposed to reflect that Tennyson is not personally Tennysonian, I summon up the image of Browning, and this has the effect of making me check my complaints.

Ah, Browning--that's where James is at his best in Edel's careful mosaic of his impressions. Browning, James wrote, was "loud, sound, normal, hearty," and "bustling with prompt responses and expected opinions and usual views." It's when he reads his work aloud, James explains, that he's really distinctive:

One of my latest sensations was going one day to Lady Airlie's to hear Browning read his own poems--with the comfort of finding that, at least, if you don't understand them, he himself apparently understands them even less. He read them as if he hated them and would like to bite them to pieces.

For all his circumlocution and endless hedging, when James cuts to the chase--as he does more often in his letters than elsewhere--he has an almost unparalleled ability to summon up a striking description. Can't you just see Browning reading now? It makes me wish James had been around to meet Byron . . .

Even Tennyson can be tentative

Not much time tonight--I made the mistake of deciding to make rice pudding, which (I had forgotten) involves standing at the stove for an inordinately long time, toil-and-troubling as the concoction bubbles. So I'll simply share a passage I came across while hopping around in Tennyson's letters earlier this week. Like a lot of nineteenth-century volumes of letters, it was a "Life and," which tends to be annoying: letters get presented out of context, partially quoted and partially summarized, and it's frequently hard to be sure of their dates and addressees.

In the case of the Tennyson volume, however, the grab-bag approach was fruitful: the editors threw in some Tennyson-related passages from the diaries and letters of those who knew him, which yielded the following account from Aubrey de Vere's diary:

Alfred Tennyson came in and smoked his pipe. He told us with pleasure of his dinner with Wordsworth—was pleased as well as amused by Wordsworth saying to him, "Come, brother bard, to dinner," and taking his arm; said that he was ashamed of paying Mr. Wordsworth compliments, but that he had at last, in the dark, said something about the pleasure he had had from Mr. Wordsworth’s writings, and that the old poet had taken his hand, and replied with some expressions equally kind and complimentary.

I enjoy the idea of Wordsworth--the conservative, older Wordsworth--calling Tennyson "brother bard." And isn't it easy to imagine Tennyson, briefly the picture of English reticence, quietly muttering some words of praise and gratitude?

All of which reminds me that I've got another bit of Tennysoniana (is that the word?) for you as well! This one is a bit of a joke from a letter Rupert Brooke sent to James Strachey on August 20, 1905:

You demanded a return catechism. Here it is. As yours ‘embraced all the Important in Life’; so mine, I hope, embraces all the Unimportant in Life—a much more essential thing.

1. What are the two greatest tragedies in Life?

2. Shew the comic side of both.

3. What is the most beautiful adjective in English?

4. When did you give up reading Tennyson?

5. What is the World coming to?

Good-night.

The only one which I'd expect you, fair reader, to answer, is number 3. My answer? Hmm. I do have a soft spot for "numinous," though the need for it is rare. "Sere" is also good, though even less useful. Perhaps "inordinate" (see above) or "wanton" would do?

"Come on," he shouted, "I am always better after vomiting."

Looking for a temporary distraction from the unremittingly grim fourth section of Roberto Bolano's 2666, this evening I dipped into the nearest repository of lit-nerd manna, The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (2008), where I once again found some good stuff to share.

We'll start with a story that has the distinction of featuring a couple of recurrent I've Been Reading Lately fascinations: Lord Byron (whose admonition to his friend Edward John Trelawny provides this post's headline) and inappropriate pets. From Leslie Marchand's Byron: A Portrait (1971):

When he returned to Cambridge in the autumn, he bought a tame bear and lodged him in the small hexagonal tower above his rooms. He enjoyed the sensation he made when he took bruin for walks on a chain like a dog. He announced with pride to Elizabeth Pigot: "I have got a new friend, the finest in the world, a tame bear. When I brought him here, they asked me what i meant to do with him, and my reply was, 'he should sit for a fellowship.'"

For another comment on Byron, we move to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from the entry of May 18, 1866 in the diary of poet William Allingham:

We spoke of Byron. T. greatly admired him in boyhood, but does not now.

"When I heard of his death (it was at Somersby, my Father's rectory) I went out to the back of the house and cut on a wall with my knife, 'Lord Byron is dead.'"

"Parts of Don Juan are good, but other parts are badly done. I like some of his small things."

A.--"Any of his Tales, or Mysteries, or Plays?"
T.--"No."
A.--"He was the one English writer who disparaged Shakespeare. He was a Lord, and talked about, and he wrote vulgarly, therefore he was popular."
T.--"Why am I popular? I don't write very vulgarly."
A.--"I have often wondered that you are, and Browning wonders."
T.--"I believe it's because I'm Poet-Laureate. It's something like being a lord."

I love the query, "Why am I popular?" Is Tennyson actually mystified, or is he simply fishing for compliments?

Following the chain of references, we come unexpectedly to Churchill. In this excerpt from Violet Bonham Carter's Winston Churchill as I Knew Him (1965), Sir Winston, about to be made Home Secretary in 1910, discusses with Bonham Carter the question of suitable reading material for prison inmates:

I asked what books he thought they would enjoy and he trotted out several old favourites from his first days of self-education at Bangalore headed by Gibbon and Macaulay. I expressed some doubts about the popularity of his list. "If you had just committed murder would you feel inclined to read Gibbon?" "Well, the stern and speedy process of the Law might place a noose around my neck and string me up before I had time to launch myself on that broad stream. But for robbery with violence, arson, rape . . ." Here followed a long inventory of crimes well fitted to whet the appetite of their authors for Gibbon. I said that I would rather be hanged than endure a life-sentence. He vehemently disagreed. "Never abandon life. There is a way out of everything--except death." He was obviously confident of finding his way out of a life-sentence and I daresay he was right. I quoted Dickens, "Life is given us on the understanding that we defend it to the last." He liked that and repeated it to himself. "'Defend it to the last'--I'd do it. So would you. What is it you once called yourself--'red in tooth and claw'? I like to see you plunge your claws--those delicate and rosy claws--into the vitals of a foe." "It wasn't my phrase, it was Tennyson's." "Never read him. Should I like his books?" "Not much I think, nor would the criminals."

I agree: it's hard to imagine Parker dipping into Tennyson should he find himself unlucky enough to be behind bars. And what must the rest of Churchill's list of Gibbon-suitable crimes have included?

Which leads me close with an anecdote of Edward Gibbon himself, from Recollections of the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers (1856):

Gibbon took very little exercise. He had been staying some time with Lord Sheffield in the country; and when he was about to go away, the servants could not find his hat. "Bless me," said Gibbon, "I certainly left it in the hall on my arrival here." He had not stirred out of doors during the whole of the visit.

Now there is a point at which we modern folks--even those dedicated readers who are the natural audience for this wonderful anthology--have an advantage: in the absence of the brace of servants that Gibbon had at his beck, we at least have to put the book down and leave the house every once in a while. The gin, after all, does eventually run out.