These Possible Lives Read online

  These Possible Lives

  Also by Fleur Jaeggy

  * * *

  I Am the Brother of XX

  Last Vanities

  Sweet Days of Discipline

  S.S. Proleterka

  Contents

  Thomas De Quincey

  John Keats

  Marcel Schwob

  Thomas De Quincey

  Thomas De Quincey became a visionary in 1791 when he was six years old. His older brother William was looking for a way to walk on the ceiling upside down like a fly. Richard, whom they called Pink, signed on to a whaling ship and was captured by pirates. The other siblings were depressives. Thomas leafed listlessly through the pages of Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp. Every morning Mrs. De Quincey inspected the children, perfuming them with lavender or rose water, and then icily dismissed them from her presence until lunch. Dreams of “terrific grandeur” settled on the nursery. A delectatio morosa had clawed its way in; the children took on the peculiar appearance, malevolent and lucid, of those who frolic with nightmares — those who are touched with pensiveness — which Baudelaire then translated marqué par la rêverie fatale. His sister Jane lived three years. When she died, Thomas thought that she would come back, like a crocus. Children who grow up in the country know about death; they can, in a manner of speaking, see their own bones out the window, in the frugal garden plots. Thomas planted an herb garden and when he finished, he solemnly stopped waiting for Jane. Observing the winter garden, the remnants of vegetation poking out through the snow, their slow dialogue with their own brittle roots, he deplored “that disgusting thing that is the degeneration of the winter approaching spring.” From the first week in November until the end of January he pleaded with the sky: he wanted more snow, more ice, more storms and frost. His sister Elizabeth fell sick and Thomas fancied he saw a “tiara of light or a gleaming aureola,” a sign of her “premature intellectual grandeur.” Mr. Percival — friend of the Marquis de Condorecet and Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert as well as Mr. Charles White; noted for his paper on human craniology proposing the measurement of heads selected from all varieties of the human species — was summoned. The cause of death was Hydrocephalus. Thomas put forth a different theory: not that the sickness would have stimulated the “preternatural growth of the intellect,” but rather the inverse, arguing that “this growth of the intellect coming on spontaneously” had outrun the capacities of physical structure. Old age descended on the child. Thomas took his leave of youth, like a caliph takes leave of his rosebush. Sneaking over to Elizabeth, the desolate dandy stared at her transparent eyelids. He noted the Bible and other small objects in the dim room, and then heard a cracking sound, hollow and desolate — everything had become so remote. A requiem shone between the girl’s stiffening hands, the light was mocking and complicit. The boy set about writing. He dictated his memories to the airless quiet, to the ashes, to destiny’s whispering ways, that gloomy exclamation point, the visions, the apathy. He wished for long life. He gathered up his gloves, hat, and white handkerchief, and headed off to the funeral procession, quoting “sweet and solemn farewell” as he went.

  His father, owner of Quincey and Duck Linen Drapers, Manchester, lived in Lisbon, the Portuguese mountains, and in St. Kitts in the West Indies — all in the hope of forestalling the deterioration of his lungs. Then he’d come home and languish on a divan for weeks at a time. Words sprang to life, like “execution,” “legacy,” and “guardians,” of which Thomas had four: a banker, a merchant, a judge, and the Reverend Samuel Hall. The child, observing like a mere bystander, shudders gently. He listened to three hundred sermons by Reverend Hall and was assigned to write summaries from memory. At the Grammar School of Bath he was subject to corporal punishment if he made mistakes. A blow to the head from a teacher’s ruler. In those days, at certain charity schools, students were actually tortured. There were reports of one child who was branded with a hot iron. Sluggish and slow-witted from hunger, some were bedridden. Others were locked in basement cells. They didn’t dare strike Charles Lamb, with his spindly legs. Coleridge wept, convinced he was going to die there. In Yorkshire, at Cowan Bridge, there was a school for the children of clergy. The children were toughened up — it was their directive — learning how to maintain a gelid expression and never reveal pain. They ate burned porridge. Maria and Elizabeth Brontë died after just a few months. Charlotte and Emily returned to the parsonage in Haworth only after the school was closed due to a typhoid epidemic, and went back to their needlepoint.

  In the month of July, 1802, a trunk toppled down the stairs of the Grammar School of Manchester. It belonged to Thomas De Quincey and heralded the beginning of the tale of the teenage runaway. He would turn his back on the empty desks, the thought baubles that had been indulged there — he left them behind as if they were objects. The vestiges of his precocious erudition seemed to dissipate in the first light of dawn. He would no longer respond at roll call, and instead wandered nameless through the English countryside and the city of London. Umbrella in hand and the plays of Euri­pides in his pocket, he started walking. Thomas was on an adventure in poverty, relying on no resources beyond the tenuous protocol of frugality. In London he shared neither the gruel of the poor nor the crumbs of the wealthy, feeding instead on the hand-me-downs of a moneylender. Mr. Brunell liked the wan creature who’d descended on him like a stray — with his deliberate distractibility, his begging, and his theories about the price of furnished rooms, groceries, trout, butter, and onions. The cost of knowledge about the great world had exhausted TDQ. How much, he asked himself, could one day’s happiness cost? Half a guinea? Rapacity was the moneylender’s dominant frame of mind and although he was amicably disposed somewhere deep inside, or else gave the illusion of kindness, he didn’t allow himself to be constrained by the formalities of his station or by any proclivity to compassion. He ate cookies while sitting on the only chair. The loan shark and the scholar, the latter always on his feet, spoke of Greek and Roman classics. The mice stopped short on their tear, discerning in the hungry yet trustworthy young client a new roommate for their sordid manor. They watched him grow agitated in his sleep, motoring his legs upward only to stop short intermittently, his gears slipping like a machine’s. They heard him call out his own name, heard him moan and then cock his ear in the silence, listening for the sound to repeat. His voice, emerging from the ominous murk of dreams, passed alongside, fleeting like the miserable yelps of sleeping dogs.

  Cloaked in a driver’s mantle, some legal papers, and frost, Thomas surprised his shoes and went skating down the street, coasting to a stop on the corner of Oxford Street in front of his little friend Ann.

  A pen-on-paper drawing of a London street, a clock, an empty hourglass — the slightest geomantic sketch reveals the place where TDQ was introduced to opium. A weak smile crept upon his lips and he almost laughed aloud, as in a memory. It was perhaps a morning in March (or was it the autumn?) in 1804. His lapidary voice, incurably affable, pronounced high praise of the potion. His entry into that world was like being a guest in the pages of a richly illustrated encyclopedia for children, where inanimate objects have the sturdiness of intoxication momentarily evanesced. Happiness teased him, then tilted, almost as if happiness were itself in a rage — or some graceful convulsion of nature.

  After reading Kant, he thought he might go live in a Canadian monastery. But was drawn instead to Dove Cottage, where Wordsworth had lived. The walls were hidden behind a dense fall of ivy; the façade was decorated with rose, jasmine, and honeysuckle. The friendship with Wordsworth deteriorated in time. The death of the poet’s young daughter, Kate, should have brought the men together again, and yet that never happened. De Quincey knelt ev
ery night over the child’s grave. He increased his dosage of laudanum. Wordsworth may well have found fault with the self-indulgent aspects of TDQ’s grief, his demonstrable lack of faith in Providence. It was midnight, a few months later, when Thomas felt a singular sensation shooting from his knee down his calf. It lasted for five hours and when it was over, despair abdicated. He was overcome with laughter. The memory of Kate disappeared and her little red morocco shoes were deposited alongside other secular relics.

  Henry Fuseli ate a diet of raw meat in order to obtain splendid dreams; Lamb spoke of “Lilliputian rabbits” when eating frog fricassee; and his sister Mary, wielding a knife, chased a little girl who was helping her in the kitchen and then stabbed her own mother through the heart; Hazlitt was perceptive about musculature and boxers; Wordsworth used a buttery knife to cut the pages of a first-edition Burke. Coleridge, his head shrouded in a fog, read poetry badly and moaned gloomily. The dreams of Jean Paul, the crow that loved the storm, reverberated across the Lake District. This was TDQ’s Western Passage.

  To the East: ibis and crocodiles found him pedantic — the flâneur was driven forward by opium-fueled theological caprices. A pack of gods clutched him. The pyramids, hospice of the dead. He dreamed up the abominable crocodile head and the turbaned Malay, delighting in the sickness and horror of original matter, deposits of which could be traced back to the stars.

  There were others who helped themselves to dreams. Robert Southey experimented with laughing gas. Ann Radcliffe sought out huge quantities of indigestible food to reinforce her terrible night visions. Mrs. Leigh Hunt was proud to have produced an apocalyptic dream, which then appeared in a poem by Shelley. Coleridge, distracted by the scratching of his pen over the paper while transcribing his dream, forgot part of it. And Lamb complained about the derelict impoverishment of his dreams.

  With gracious ceremony, Thomas addressed the staff in the kitchen. On behalf of the poets, he outlined how dyspepsia afflicted him, emphasizing the possibility that there were additional stomach conditions, and pointed out as well the possibly disastrous consequences of cutting mutton on the dia­gonal rather than longitudinally. The noble language intimidated the Scottish maids, who were already shaken by his sorcerer turn. They wondered if they might see him disappear up the chimney. At night, he’d climb out the window and the peasants on the outskirts of Edinburgh would see his mud-and-leaf-plastered shadow lurking about against the flickering light of a lantern.

  He sat on the sofa next to the fireplace when he wrote. The fire stayed lit, summer and winter. The room was snowed under with manuscripts, drafts, papers. There was a narrow path leading from the door to the fireplace and then over to the carafe. He groomed his manuscripts with a brush. This, according to James Hogg in his account of meeting De Quincey, made him an enigmatic sphinx. He wore a heavy wool cape, threadbare with holes, buttoned up to his chin; his shoes were knitted to his feet, and his pants stained black with ink. He seemed empty. They generally thought of him as an incendiary. “Papa” one of his daughters said, “your hair is on fire.” De Quincey smoothed away the sparks with a hand. He was sometimes overcome with sleepiness in his studio and nodded off, pulling the candles down with him. Ash reliefs adorned his manuscripts. When the flames got too high he’d run to block the door, afraid someone would burst in and throw water on his papers. He put out fires with his robe, or the rug — the thin cleric wrapped his words in smoke, chains, links, captivity, bondage. When invited to dinner, he promised attendance, holding forth on the subject of the enchantments of punctuality. At the appointed time, however, he was elsewhere. Perhaps he was studying pages piled up like bales of hay in one of the many shelters that he never remembered having rented. Paper storage, fragments of delirium eaten away by dust.

  He married Margaret Simpson, the daughter of a salesman, and they had eight children whom he educated himself. Sara Coleridge publicly accused De Quincey of having neglected the children’s education and even of having introduced them to opium. Julius died at four years old; William, the eldest boy, was taken by an obscure brain disease; and Horatio fell in China serving his country. The ascension to the throne of Queen Victoria as well as the emancipation of black slaves left him indifferent. He was distant from the terrors of the living. In a letter to Miss Mitford, De Quincey mentioned an “dark frenzy of horror” that expanded to cover everything that he was writing. Everything would be suddenly wrapped in a “sheet of consuming fire.” Paper seemed poisoned to his eyes. He spent the last years of his life reworking and correcting his drafts for Selections Grave and Gay, from Writings Published and Unpublished, which would run fourteen volumes and be complete in 1860. On October 22, 1859, he received a visit from Mr. Begbie who found him seated on the divan, head resting perched on a pillow on a chair in front of him. He had assumed such a position, not because of the pain, but because of his extremely weak state. He could barely read through one eye and yet was scrutinizing Allibone’s Dictionary of English Literature. In November he fell asleep in the middle of the day, from sheer fatigue, and when he woke, he looked around in surprise. It would be necessary to reassure him of the identity of the people around him and about the objects in the room. At times he discerned the “footsteps of angels” and would address himself to the deceased. Then he delighted in the supreme calm. He declared that he’d been invited to the great feast of Jesus Christ along with the children and instructed them to dress in white from head to toe. He was then devastated when select Edinburgh miscreants saw the children dressed in white crossing Lothian Street and began to mock them, resulting in the children’s great embarrassment. On Tuesday, December 6, he stayed in his chair and conversed with agility but lacked his customary ease. That day he refused food and by Wednesday morning, it seemed evident that his hours were numbered. He recognized his eldest daughter in the afternoon. “Thank you,” he said simply, to whoever was around him — his tone was sweet and his expression radiant. He thought he saw his sister Elizabeth and called out to her. His breath grew slow. Then he went numb, lost consciousness gradually, and in the first hours of December 8, he died. A semblance of youth came over his face. He was seventy-four years old but seemed a boy of fourteen. They didn’t allow the morning light into the room and at nine they lit the candles. His death, according to Mr. Begbie, was caused by a state of the generalized extenuation of the organism rather than by a specific illness. They said that he had been a “good sick man,” and a gracious corpse; he hadn’t wanted to trouble anyone. Mr. Begbie noted that he had not been affected by senilis stultitia quae deliratio appellari solet.

  John Keats

  In 1803, the guillotine was a common children’s toy. Children also had toy cannons that fired real gunpowder, and puzzles depicting the great battles of England. They went around chanting, “Victory or death!” Do childhood games influence character? We have to assume that they do, but let’s set aside such heartbreaking speculations for a moment. War — it’s not even a proper game — leaves influenza in its wake, and cadavers. Do childhood games typically leave cadavers behind in the nursery? Massacres in those little fairy-dust minds? Hoist the banners of victory across the table from the marzipan mountain to the pudding! It’s perhaps a dreadful thought, but we’ve seen clear evi­dence that both children and adults have a taste for imitation. Certainly, such questions should be explored, and yet let us allow that there is a purely metaphysical difference between a toy guillotine and war. Children are metaphysical creatures, a gift they lose too early, sometimes at the very moment they learn to talk.

  John Keats was seven years old and in school at Enfield. He was seized by the spirit of the time, by a peculiar compulsion, an impetuous fury — before writing poetry. Any pretext seemed to him a good one for picking a fight with a friend, any pretext to fight.

  Fighting was to John Keats like eating or drinking. He sought out aggressive boys, cruel boys, but their company, as he was already inclined to poetry, must have provided some comic and burlesque tre
ats. For mere brutality — without humor, make-believe, or whimsy — didn’t interest him. Which might lead a person to extrapolate that boys aren’t truly brutal. Yes, they are, but they have rules and an aesthetic. Keats was a child of action. He’d punched a yard monitor more than twice his size, and he was considered a strong boy, lively and argumentative. When he was brawling, his friend Clarke reports, Keats resembled Edmund Kean at theatrical heights of exasperation. His friends predicted a brilliant future for him in the military. Yet when his temper defused, he’d grow extremely calm, and his sweetness shone — with the same intensity as his rage had. The scent of angels. His earliest brushes with melancholy were suddenly disrupted by outbursts of nervous laughter. Moods, vague and tentative, didn’t settle over him so much as hurry past like old breezes. A year before leaving Enfield — the Georgian-style school building would later be converted into a train station and then ultimately be demolished — John Keats discovered Books. Books were the spoils left by the Incas, by Captain Cook’s voyages, Robinson Crusoe. He went to battle in Lemprière’s dictionary of classical myth, among the reproductions of ancient sculptures and marbles, the annals of Greek fable, in the arms of goddesses. He walked through the gardens, a book in hand. During recreation breaks, he read Elizabethan translations of Ovid. Scholars have made a habit of pointing out that the poet didn’t know Greek. So what? Even Lord Byron insinuated that Keats hadn’t done anything more than set Lemprière to verse. In the same way that the translation errors from Greek don’t at all invalidate Hölderlin’s Der Archipelagus, Keats’s own transposed Greek perhaps allowed him to tear up the fields of Albion with the shards of classical ruins. He revealed to no one that he was an orphan. The tutors were glued to his side. He forgot his birthday and decided to study medicine. He learned how to leech, pull teeth, and suture. He observed cadavers on the dissection table that had been purchased off the resurrection men for three or four guinea each. The naked bodies were delivered in sacks. Keats took notes and in the margins sketched skulls, fruit, and flowers. He felt alone. The “blue devils” settled along with him into the damp room. He frequented the Mathew family, his cousins, Ann and Caroline, who had a righteous horror of the frivolities of youth.