The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Oozing and palely loitering
It is 200 years since Keats’s death, and a clutch of new biographies take a strangely puritanical turn
Situated for two centuries in the icy silence of his tomb, in the Cimitero Acattolico, Rome, John Keats at least hasn’t had to confront the Keatsians – the scholars, academics and other buffoons, who have published books and papers about Keats’ Post-Newtonian Poetics, The Etymology of Porphyro’s Name, The Dying Keats: A Case for Euthanasia? and, not forgetting, Keats, Modesty and Masturbation.
Now comes Lucasta Miller’s Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph (Jonathan Cape, £17.99), which is one big farrago of cliché, jargon, mixed metaphor and general sloppiness. Page upon page is filled with phrases like under the skin, scruff of its neck, strapped for cash, cocked a snook, one fell swoop, punches far above the weight. Ad infinitum, via, raison d’être, status quo, inter alia and social kudos pepper the paragraphs, along with opined, emotional fallout, hands-on mentor, helicopter parenting, suburban new-build, dysfunctional childhood, downside and “a bonding eight-week hiking holiday”.
Miller talks about wanting “to foreground those aspects” of this, that and the other thing; she’ll “excavate their backstories”. Keats, “a lower-class literary wannabe”, stuck to his “individual take, regardless of the mainstream” – which is another way of saying the poet “refused to bow to conventionalities in his lifetime”, though it’s hard to see how he could do anything much – bow, scrape, dance a jig – after his lifetime.
If the contemporary critics generally mocked Keats’s work, this is because “periodical culture was a seething piranha pool in which poetry and politics were joined at the hip”. His Romantic imagination, we are vouchsafed, was “elastic, winged and capacious”, which conjures in my mind a picture of Ena Sharples’s knickers.
Miller imposes on Keats her righteous and reproving “woke” sensibility. She is unhappy about “exploitative political power” in any guise, and in Regency England, “most Britons… would have found it hard to make sure their investments were ethically pure”.
Keats’s mother’s second husband was a bank clerk who “remained tied at a remove to the international slave economy”. When Keats’s brother George settled in Kentucky, he befriended the ornithologist Audubon, “who has recently been outed as a slave holder”.
Poor Miller traps herself in a whirligig of assertions, for example, that English literature itself is “in denial of the fact” it was developing and flaming into being “on the back of a burgeoning capitalist empire.” So what are we meant to do, then? Cancel literacy, tradition and civilised habits out of a trumped up sense of phoney guilt?
I also wonder why Miller has taken Keats as her subject, as she is worried that he is already “canonised as a dead white European male”, which implies that only live black or Asian women are truly morally upright, possess fortitude and humility, and are hence permitted a voice.
Having established her dedication to “today’s postcolonial consciousness”, which is irrelevant, as Keats himself would have probably only possessed a pre-colonial consciousness, or perhaps a colonial consciousness (he visited the Isle of Wight – is that part of the Empire? Also Dorking – is that?); having assured us she is unimpeachable, Miller is then keen to rat on Keats for The Eve of St Agnes.
Miller says ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ is about a ‘Peeping Tom and sexual predator’
Where, along with the Pre-Raphaelite painters, I’d long happily believed the poem an erotically charged dream-vision, Miller says it is about “a Peeping Tom and sexual predator… the scenario feels uncomfortable today”, as if composed by Roman Polanski with help from Woody Allen. The verses describe “non-consensual sex and a male poet’s fantasy”.
Actually, Keats may have died a virgin, for all his rhapsodies about “slippery blisses”. The love of his life, the girl next door, Fanny Brawne, was not really smitten with a chap whose health was failing and who had no income to support a wife. Their relationship, in Miller’s typical phrase, “was kept under wraps”.
Of Keats’s famous imagery about food – wild honey, candied apples, quinces, plums, jellies, curds: all of that “has always made me gag a bit”, declares Miller, with her unerring gift for not winning this reader’s sympathy. I would have thought that those catalogues of fruits ought to have earned the poet full marks for veganism.
Still, at least Keats wasn’t “an aristocratic megastar”, like Lord Byron, though the word megastar cleaves more to Dame Edna. Keats’s career was “a dig at class privilege”, as there he was, publishing airyfairy odes about dreams, sorrow, pain, pallid moonshine, dewdrops and rustling silks, and him no better, socially speaking, than the son of a Cockney livery stable manager, i.e. not much more than a glorified groom or horny-handed ostler.
Keats was born in 1795, a year after his father, Thomas, had eloped with the boss’s daughter, Frances, who was 19 at the time. Thomas was killed in a riding accident in 1804, and the future poet was sent away, on his maternal grandfather’s money, to be educated at Clarke’s Academy in Enfield, then a village deep in the country.
Here Keats was encouraged to read Homer, Shakespeare and Milton. He also discovered Italianate medievalism. “The school offered unparalleled opportunities for intellectual development in a contained and compassionate environment,” says Miller, as if she is quoting from a 21st-century management brochure.
What I did appreciate in Miller’s study, however, is the emphasis she gives, not to literary material, but to Keats’s medical training at Guy’s Hospital, which began at the age of 14, when he was apprenticed to an apothecary. Keats’s mother, Frances, died of tuberculosis in 1810 – Keats did his best to nurse her. Medicine “was taught by training on the job”, not as a university course.
Keats knew how to write prescriptions in Latin. He assisted at surgical operations. He attempted to treat pulmonary conditions, asthma, pneumonia, whooping cough. Keats attended human anatomy classes, witnessed the amputation of limbs without anaesthetic, and there are records he extracted pistol balls from open wounds.
Thus, the comprehensive knowledge of drugs and balms throbbing throughout the poems – pills and potions that benumb, bring on drowsiness, excite or depress the pulse, ensuring “pain had no sting, and pleasure’s wreath no flower”. The hallucinogenic atmosphere is pharmaceutically induced; the Romantic ebbing and flowing, the blood rush and fixation upon evanescence, putrefaction even (“thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours”), were all inspired by the hospital wards. Heart beats, night sweats, death agony.
In 1818, after watching his brother, Tom, “spitting blood” and dying, like their mother, of tuberculosis, Keats himself succumbed to the disease. He went to Italy for the climate, but was soon vomiting arterial plasma, “black and thick in the extreme”. He died in February 1821, aged 25. “I think I shall be among the English poets at my death,” he said. Well, in the Roman graveyard he is next to RM Ballantyne, a Scot, and Lindsay Kemp, a mime artist from South Shields.
Jonathan Bate, in Bright Star, Green Light (William Collins, £25), covers exactly the same ground, utilising the same sources, the same pictures. But to flesh out his text, Bate also gives us a potted biography of F Scott Fitzgerald, because Tender is the Night, he points out, is a Keatsian quotation. He may quite as well have furnished us with a potted biography of Rupert Brooke, as This Side of Paradise is a Brooke quotation, as well as being the title of a Star Trek episode.
Bate justifies his parallel lives by pointing out that both Keats and Fitzgerald were short in stature (and touchy about this); were children of wars (Napoleonic, First World War); romanticised women (the ones who got away); knew disease (alcoholism being Fitzgerald’s affliction). But the differences are greater. Keats was a likeable Cockney of genius, Fitzgerald a priggish jumped-up magazine writer of whom Groucho Marx observed, “he’s a sick old man” – yet he was only 44 when he died.
I was surprised to hear that Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda became pals with “the best-known lesbian in Paris”, somebody Bate identifies as “Oscar Wilde’s daughter Dolly”. It is conceivable he means Wilde’s brother Willie’s daughter Dorothy. Or Dorothy L Sayers. It’s not an uncommon name.
Like Miller, Bate is keen to establish his neo-puritan wholesomeness. Keats, who enjoyed claret, and said “you do not feel it quarrelling with your liver”, may have been more aware of the perils of intoxication “had [he] lived longer”. But he didn’t.
His knowledge of drugs, balms and pills came from what he saw in hospital wards