Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

“THE RECKONING” by Charles Nicholl (first published 1992; revised edition 2002)

There’s an incident in my life which I still remember with incredulous amusement.

About fourteen years ago, my wife and I were visiting one of our sons, who was then a student at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. We were having breakfast with him and a bunch of other students in the college’s ancient and august dining hall, when a cleaner walked past our table with a cleaning rag over one arm, and a framed portrait under the other. I did a double take. The portrait was the famous Elizabethan image (dated 1585) of a young gentleman, who has often been identified with one of Corpus Christi’s most famous (or notorious) alumni, Christopher Marlowe (1564-93). It’s the image that most often appears on collected editions of Marlowe’s plays.

“Surely that isn’t the original?” I said to my son.

“Of course it is,” he replied, and explained that it was often taken down for its frame to be wiped.

To me, seeing it carried along as casually as this created about the same effect as I would have felt had it been van Gogh’s sunflowers or the Mona Lisa. Here’s a world-renowned, and obviously very valuable, work of art being carried as casually as if it were a cheap household article.

I am not an obsessive about Christopher Marlowe. Comparing Marlowe with

Shakespeare and Jonson is a bit like comparing Dylan Thomas with Eliot and Yeats. On the one side there’s a young man who can come up with compelling and memorable phrases, but whose range is very limited and his outlook un-nuanced – on the other, two mature literary geniuses who, for all their own shortcomings, had a vaster range, more mature vision and greater depth of feeling. Marlowe (dead at 29) is the enfant terrible. Of course with his best lines and phrases, you thank him for liberating drama “from jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits / And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay” and you have heard all the stuff about “Marlowe’s mighty line”. But when all is done, you end up with a young guy who left us great promise unfulfilled and a heap of fragments.

I turn to the volume of his collected poems, and find what he left of Hero and Leander is shorter than the “completions” by George Chapman and Henry Petowe. I go to his collected plays and recall fondly reading them all as an undergraduate. Easy enough to do, as there are only seven of them. My score card goes thus: Dido, Queen of Carthage and The Massacre at Paris are clearly unpolished, incomplete fragments, though there is some fun in the latter when Marlowe inserts lots of sick humour into what should be straightforward anti-Catholic propaganda. Yes, the two parts of Tamburlaine did introduce the “mighty line”, and you are happy to parade along with it for a while – but, my God, it does go on and on and on as tediously as The Lord of the Rings movies, being more a spectacle, pageant or Elizabethan “progress” than a play. For structure and design his two most finished plays are Edward II, a pretty good royal tragedy, and The Jew of Malta. But the latter has to be forbidden territory. I know most of the commentators are eager to tell us that the Christian characters are as nasty a lot as the Jewish villain is, and that Marlowe is playing with Machiavelli. I know Barabas has been designed with the same sort of sick humour as Shakespeare’s Richard III or Dickens’ Quilp – he is a demonic character along with whom we gloat and laugh as often as we deplore him. But the play is still irredeemably anti-Semitic. And so we are left with what should be Marlowe’s masterpiece, Doctor Faustus. But (in either of the two very different surviving versions) even here there are problems – the brilliant scenes, especially as Faustus approaches his end, jostling with the overlong, irrelevant and unfunny knockabout. I prefer the shorter version, but it’s still fiery flashes in a bucket of mud rather than a full tragic drama.

So I look at Marlowe’s career and I say “Such brilliance (in the literal sense of the word)! Such talent! So clearly a young man who could have written more. What a pity he died so young.”

Which brings me at last to Charles Nicholl’s The Reckoning, subtitled The Murder of Christopher Marlowe. Nicholl is fond of literary mysteries [look up the index at right for my take on his Somebody Else, a book about the post-poetic life of Arthur Rimbaud].

The Reckoning is one of, by now, many, many attempts to reconstruct what “really” happened when Christopher Marlowe died, and why it happened; but it is probably the most detailed and (given that it inevitably contains much speculation) it is also the most plausible.

            In 1593, the 29-year-old Marlowe was killed in a fight in a room in Deptford by a

nondescript thug called Ingram Frizer. At least that was the official story. Frizer said he drew his blade in self-defence when Marlowe attacked him in a quarrel over the “reckoning” (bill) for a meal they had shared. The coroner accepted this version of events, which was corroborated by the other two men who were in the small room at the time, Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley. Frizer was acquitted of murder and there the matter should have ended.

            The trouble was, though, that this tale was just a little too convenient, especially for some in high places who had a short time earlier arrested and interrogated Marlowe about his blasphemous views. They weren’t at all displeased to have the budding young literary genius out of the way. Even more suspiciously, Frizer, Skeres and Poley were all low-level operatives in England’s early spy service, directed by Robert Cecil and others. They were mainly involved in the business of entrapping Catholics for not conforming to the newly-invented state church, the Church of England, or, as agents provocateurs, devising treasonous plots that could be blamed on Catholics.

It seems that Marlowe too was part of this grubby business.

Though he came from a financially humble background (his father was a shoemaker), Marlowe had been to Cambridge and had studied for an MA. But rumours of his unorthodox beliefs – and possibly rumours that he himself was going to cross to a seminary in France and train as a Catholic priest – meant that there was a dispute over whether he should be awarded his degree. This was solved for him when high-ranking government officials signed a document – which still survives – refuting such rumours and declaring that Marlowe had actually been about official business. He was duly awarded his MA. There is the strong implication that, under Robert Cecil’s orders, he had been infiltrating Catholic groups in order to spy on them and to dob them in.

            Since the coroner’s report on Marlowe’s death was first discovered (by Leslie Hotson) among official records in the 1920s, there has been speculation about what really happened in that small and private room in Deptford (often wrongly assumed to be a tavern and therefore giving rise to stories of Marlowe’s death in a “tavern brawl”). Given the personnel involved, given that Marlowe was in the company of three fellow spies, it is at least possible that Marlowe’s death was more a deliberate “hit” than the outcome of an impulsive fight.

            The Reckoning trawls carefully through such documents as survive, Nicholl’s 500-odd pages draw out the networks of influence that existed between the spies, the playwrights, the propagandists and the politicians of the day. His case is that Marlowe’s death was incidental to a larger plan to entrap and discredit Sir Walter Raleigh. A gadfly in parliament, a man accused of unorthodox beliefs, and an enemy of other powerful people, Raleigh was often called an atheist. In some of his most illuminating passages, Nicholl argues that “atheism” in late Elizabethan England did not mean what it means now. The term was used for any religious view that was not clearly Catholic, Anglican or Puritan-Protestant, including the type of Arianism (the belief that Christ was less than God but more than human), which Marlowe and Raleigh might both have espoused.  We have to remember that “evidence” that Marlowe was guilty of even more blasphemous beliefs was mainly drawn out of “witnesses” under torture. “Evidence” that Marlowe was homosexual also has to be treated with some caution. Here is the poet who writes of Jove and Ganymede; the playwright who gives the most overt depiction of a homosexual relationship in Edward II – yet again, direct evidence for Marlowe’s sexual life is ambiguous and was mainly extorted (from Thomas Kyd and others) under duress.

Like his “atheism”, Marlowe’s homosexuality could have been something manufactured to discredit him and, by association, to discredit Walter Raleigh.

The world depicted in The Reckoning is a sordid and dangerous one. Late Elizabethan England is aptly described as a police state, not as some Hollywood fantasy of “Merrie England”, and the espionage game here is as ruthless as its modern equivalent. Reviewing this book some years ago I described it as “a wonderful piece of historical detection and a riveting read”, and I still hold this view. Yet here I must add some words of caution.

First, Charles Nicholl is aware that many of his conclusions have to be speculative, but he does play fair with the reader, signalling what is verifiable fact and what is informed guesswork. Even so, there are holes in his case. The inference that Marlowe was murdered on some authoritative person’s word seems a good one, given that the meeting of four spies is unlikely to have been merely a social gathering. But how Nicholl connects this with moves against Sir Walter Raleigh is a lot more tenuous.

Second, it should be noted that, after doing more research, Nicholl changed his mind about one key matter between the first (1992) and the second (2002) editions of this book. The earlier version fingers Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, as the chief mover against Sir Walter Raleigh. The second edition fingers the Secretary of State, Sir Robert Cecil

The second edition also has an added chapter on the modus operandi of the Elizabethan spy Thomas Drury, and a thirty-page appendix answering some objections that historians had raised to his earlier edition.

Dyspeptic footnote: Like Shakespeare, Marlowe has been the subject of much fiction as well as of much factual research. Anthony Burgess’s last completed novel A Dead Man in Deptford (published in 1993 on the 400^th anniversary of Marlowe’s death) assumes that Marlowe really was both homosexual and atheist in the modern sense, and has him coping with this in an angsty manner before he is murdered. More irritatingly, there are those nitwits who wish to reassign Shakespeare’s works to somebody else. Some of them – with absolutely no documentary evidence to back their claim – would like to believe that Marlowe’s death was only faked in 1593, and that Marlowe then went off into exile where he spent his time writing those plays that were attributed to the talentless frontman Shakespeare. The trigger for this absurdity is the observation (not entirely accurate) that Shakespeare’s first good plays began to appear shortly after Marlowe died. Essentially this theory is just more evidence of the old snobbery that refuses to believe a non-university-educated chap like Shakespeare could have had any genius, and that therefore wishes to hand over his plays to somebody like Cambridge-graduate Marlowe. Most recent advocate of this fantasy is Ros Barber, though in fairness her verse-novel on the subject, The Marlowe Papers, is avowedly a work of fiction. Nevertheless it is an unpleasant experience to hear her – as you can on line - arguing with Charles Nicholl at the Cheltenham literary festival in 2013, shouting over him as he attempts to make his case, and generally speaking in a fashion bordering on the bloody rude as she drowns out his measured comments.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

“SOMEBODY ELSE – Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-1891” by Charles Nicholl (first published 1997)

           

Please get out your violin and play a sentimental accompaniment, as I am about to sing one of my favourite songs. It goes like this. We should remember writers for what they write, not for how they spent their lives. The words on the page – they are the things that make writers worthy of note. So strictly speaking, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) should be remembered for Les Illuminations, Le Bateau Ivre, Une Saison en Enfer and perfect (and much anthologised) sonnets like Le Dormeur du Val.

Yet, in spite of the literary creed I profess, there are some writers whose legend manages to detach itself from their work. The reputations of poets who die young (Chatterton, Keats, Shelley, Owen etc.) are particularly prone to this phenomenon. And Rimbaud’s legend is known by people who have not read a word he wrote – or at least they have not read a word he wrote in the original French.

Here is the rebellious teenage poet, the ultimate enfant terrible, who blazed up with fully-formed works at the age of 15 or 16, wrote furiously and with inspiration for three years or so, and then stopped writing forever at the age of 19. It wasn’t death that felled him. He simply detached himself from poetry, detached himself from former bohemian friends, and went off in quest of an “ordinary” life as far as possible from his old haunts. Dying at 37, he had written no poetry for 18 years.

He has become an archetype (and regrettably also a cliché) – the inspired teenage poet who got lost in the adult world. Even before more recent poseurs got hold of Rimbaud’s image (see my rude comments below), the teenage Dylan Thomas in the 1930s was already describing himself as “the Rimbaud of Cymdonkin Drive”, conscious homage to a fellow adolescent poet with a reputation for thumbing his nose at convention.

Rimbaud was becoming somebody teenage scribblers aspired to be.

Pieced together in numerous biographies, Rimbaud’s brief career as a poet is well documented. But what happened to him after the poetry stopped? This is what concerns Charles Nicholl in Somebody Else. Nicholl is an Englishman with a taste for literary mysteries. The only other of his books which I have read is The Reckoning (1992), a convincing and detailed attempt to reconstruct what really happened when Christopher Marlowe was murdered. Somebody Else is specifically about Rimbaud’s last eleven unpoetic years in Africa. The title comes from Rimbaud’s famous “Je est un autre” (“I is somebody else”), a statement about the distinction between an author and the voice he adopts on the page. But Nicholl has apparently chosen the title because Rimbaud clearly became “somebody else” in a more literal sense once he ceased to be the adolescent poet.

In order to get Rimbaud to Africa, however, Nicholl has to spend the first quarter of his book telling us of Rimbaud’s earlier life. So we get rehearsed the good little Catholic boy from Charleville (there is a famous photograph, often reproduced, of Rimbaud on the day of his First Communion); the runaway, uncouth teenager in Brussels, Paris, London; the whole of his homo-erotic relationship with the older, and vacillating, Paul Verlaine, including their explosive bust-up; and the strong probability that the vagrant teenager was traumatised after being buggered by soldiers. The isolate Rimbaud is such a unique figure that we tend to forget his adolescent story was played out against the background of the Franco-Prussian War, with troops tramping through city and countryside as the boy’s negligent and absent soldier father had once done.

Rimbaud’s fierce and defiant slovenliness is dwelt upon (in which particular the teenager was at least the equal of the noisome Ernest Dowson). Despite a famous romanticised painting showing Rimbaud at table with Verlaine and other poets, the reality seems to have been that most of Verlaine’s café friends saw Rimbaud as an unwelcome, intruding, crude, loud-mouthed kid. In terms of either camp-ness or adolescent irony (they tend to be very similar), so much seems implied by the way Rimbaud referred to his over-controlling mother as “la Mother” (using the English word), and Verlaine and Rimbaud habitually called London “Leun-deun” when they were scraping a living there.

Thus far the first quarter of Nicholl’s book. At which point it must perforce become a minute searching of fugitive documents and scraps of evidence as Nicholl reconstructs Rimbaud’s post-poetic life. Nicholl unearths a lot, and is fair in warning us when he has had to speculate.

After a couple of aimless years wandering in Europe; after joining the Dutch army, travelling to Java, and then deserting; Arthur Rimbaud headed for Africa. Here he really did become “somebody else”, putting poetry totally behind him, never again having the least interest in it, being impatient with arty people, and becoming a very professional and enthusiastic trader. He was first based in Aden. Then he worked mainly in Ethiopia (it was at the time of his sojourn there that Ethiopia first turned itself into an indigenous empire). He reckoned his accounts. He settled in Harar. He wrote dry reports for his employers of his transactions and travels. He was taciturn, sun-tanned, rangy, and sociable enough. He might for a while have had an Ethiopian mistress. Sometimes he talked of marrying, and of having children and settling down – but he never did. He was restless, he was never domestically settled, yet he was methodical in his work.

From this book, you get the distinct impression that the chief attraction of Africa to him was that it was not Europe and it did not contain Europe’s chattering intellectuals, artists and poets. You are also aware that Rimbaud’s fairly humdrum life in Africa would hold no particular interest for us had Rimbaud not once been the adolescent poet. Nicholl makes no reference at all to the wishful idea of some commentators that Rimbaud was trying to earn enough money to live independently and return to the literary life. There is not a scrap of evidence for this. But there is much evidence that he frequently wished he had a son; and wanted that son to be an engineer – something constructive and pragmatic and 180 degrees away from poetry in cafés and the cloudy lyricism and pawing of Verlaine.

Finally Somebody Else gives us Rimbaud’s premature end. His right leg became infected and cancerous. He underwent a painful portage from Harar to the coast, and an equally painful journey to Marseilles. His leg was amputated. He made a brief visit to his native Ardennes, then a train trip back to Marseilles, where he died.

And here we come to a point of contention where Nicholl could possibly be quite wrong.

Nicholl admits that Rimbaud’s last real caregiver and faithful friend was his little sister Isabelle, who was a devout Catholic. But Nicholl is sceptical of the account (for which Isabelle is the only source) that Arthur was reconciled to the church in his last week of life, and died a pious death. Possibly Nicholl is right to be sceptical, but it is just as likely that he rejects Isabelle’s account (by which some earlier biographers have set great store) mainly because it spoils the image of the rebellious teenage poetic genius. In response, I would say that by the age of 37, Rimbaud was no longer the kid he had once been, and his working life for the best part of 15 years had been one of un-rebellious conformity and alienation from bohemianism. Like Baudelaire before him (and like James Joyce after him), his reaction to the Catholicism in which he was raised was very complex and was never a matter of simple rejection. In short, Isabelle’s story of his end is just as likely to be true as not. We simply do not know.

Nicholl is probably on surer ground when he dismisses the claim that Rimbaud was ever involved in the slave trade when he was in Africa. In her detailed 1938 book Arthur Rimbaud (which I have before me as I write this notice), the English biographer Enid Starkie seemed to produce good evidence that Rimbaud was involved in both gun-running and the slave trade. Nicholl revisits her evidence and makes a good case for discounting it. In an odd sort of way, I’d have to say that Rimbaud’s not being a slave-trader also damages the legend. There are, after all, those deluded fans, who wish to associate literary figures with unforgivable wickedness because it puts them in “the Legion of the Damned” or some such tired phrase, and gives them a perverse glamour. (Incidentally, Nicholl devotes some pages to telling us how much French biographers of Rimbaud detest Starkie’s book, and have made up a rude name for the Englishwoman.)

Having quarrelled a little with some aspects of Nicholl’s book, I now have to admit the two things that really bug me about it. First, Nicholl is far too keen to see ‘prophetic’ elements in Rimbaud’s poetry, which he interprets as specifically foretelling Rimbaud’s later life in Africa. This is very dodgy as both interpretation and literary criticism. The real achievement of the young poet gets lost. Second, he trivialises and demeans his subject with glib references to, and comparisons with, pop icons like Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Patti Smith and the like, as if Rimbaud really was merely the precursor of the Beats, free-verse improvisers and those American teens who think poetry just means letting it all hang out while posing for a camera with a sulky look. This is where I have to put in my nasty comment about poseurs attaching themselves to Rimbaud. The myth of the adolescent poet who rode on sheer wild inspiration leads to inanities like Edmund White’s superficial short biography Arthur Rimbaud: Double Life of a Rebel, which tries to set up Verlaine and Rimbaud as the dream gay couple from SoHo and Rimbaud’s poetry as “proto-punk”; or Christopher Hampton’s ridiculous 1967 play Total Eclipse [made into a forgettable movie in the 1990s], which presents Rimbaud’s long literary silence as a tragedy.

Frankly, I see no tragedy. Sure, there is something touching in the fact that the only verifiable images we have of Rimbaud in Africa are two indistinct photographs, which could be of anyone. There’s an effect of tantalising mystery to this. But my chief impression in reading Rimbaud’s poetry is of an adult intelligence inside a teenage sensibility – and when that teenage sensibility was gone, the adult intelligence moved on. Le Bateau Ivre and Une Saison en Enfer are works of literary genius because they are such brilliant and clear expositions of an adolescent mind. Beyond that adolescent sensibility, Rimbaud ceased to be a poet.

As an excellent critic of his own work, one of Rimbaud’s best decisions was to stop writing when he had nothing more to say. This was not tragedy. It was clear judgement and evidence of a man growing up.