More A-level bangers from The Book Club. I’ve just published an essay here about Brave New World, among other things.

The Lit Path

As well as convening the unforgettable ‘After Amis’ event earlier this month, ‘one-man Goalhanger’ Jack Aldane continues to release episodes of his new series, The Lit Path. In this episode Philip Hensher talks about Dickens’s Bleak House.

The Lit Path

Ep#3: Why Fiction Fans Read Men All Wrong, with Philip Hensher

What’s the one book that cracks a reader open (and up), and never quite lets them go…

Listen now

13 days ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · Jack Aldane

The London Review Bookshop Podcast

Leo Robson discusses a new novella called The Smiths with its author, Michael Bracewell. I ordered the book from Blackwell’s and was delighted to be sent a signed copy. The paean to the Smiths’ first single, ‘Hand in Glove’, is thrilling: Morrissey’s was ‘the voice of English romanticism: the idiom of crooning and swooning, Wordsworth and Windermere, sunsets and shepherds, transposed to embrace negation.’ Bracewell’s narrator later compares Morrissey’s art to something Christopher Neve said of the Cumbrian painter Sheila Fell: ‘All are risked in one indivisible image of great beauty as if from the first idea she knew what she was doing.’ And, getting to the heart of the matter,

So I fell in love with The Smiths,’ I said. ‘I think a lot of people brought their unwanted love to The Smiths.’

And a final note. I was so impressed that everyone, even the audience, got through this without a single portentous nudge-nudge comment about Morrissey. I was on the edge of my seat by the end.

The LRB Podcast

On the subject of Wordsworth and Windermere, this summer the LRB has been putting out a strand called ‘Travel with Close Readings’. In this episode, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss Books IX and X of Wordsworth’s Prelude. Book X is the one in which Wordsworth recounts his meaning crisis:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

                                                      Thus I fared,
Dragging all passions, notions, shapes of faith
Like culprits to the bar, suspiciously
Calling the mind to establish in plain day
Her titles and her honours, now believing,
Now disbelieving, endlessly perplex’d
With impulse, motive, right and wrong, the ground
Of moral obligation, what the rule
And what the sanction, till, demanding proof
And seeking it in every thing, I lost
All feeling of conviction, and in fine
Sick, wearied out with contrarieties,
Yielded up moral questions in despair[.] (X. 888–900)

Until next month.

Writing emerged in Mesopotamia some time in the late fourth millennium ʙᴄ. Its earliest use was in the making of lists.

2.

The Bible contains a variety of lists, including what biblical scholars call ‘ethical lists’, such as the Ten Commandments, eight shalt-nots and two positive directives: ‘Remember the sabbath’ and ‘Honour thy father and thy mother’ (Exodus 20: 8–12).

3.

Around 1584, William Cecil, Elizabeth I’s chief minister, wrote his own list of ‘ten precepts’ for his son: ‘next unto Moses’ tables, if thou imprint them in thy mind, thou shalt reap the benefit’. It is said that these were the inspiration for Polonius’s advice to Laertes in Hamlet: ‘Give thy thoughts no tongue, / Nor any unproportioned thought his act’ (I. iii. 62–63), etc.

4.

There are books that are lists of lists: The Book of Lists (1977) by David Wallechinsky et al. and The Infinity of Lists (2009) by Umberto Eco. Reality Hunger (2010) by David Shields is a single 618-point list. It’s a bit like a book-length version of Oscar Wilde’s preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, except that the nascent ‘artistic movement’ of which it treats sounds like the opposite of Wildean aestheticism: ‘in order to be a truly good artist, you need to link your art to your life’ (221). Some other examples:

52. Modernism ran its course, emptying out narrative. Novels became all voice, anchored neither in plot nor circumstance, driving the storytelling impulse underground.

63. Only those who keep faithful diaries will know what they were doing at this time, on this day, a year ago.

65. The lyric essayist seems to enjoy all the liberties of the fiction writer, with none of a fiction writer’s burden of unreality[.]

180. Nonfiction writers imagine. Fiction writers invent.

200. I make it real by putting it into words.

278. User-made content is the new folk art.

287. Reality is what is imposed on you; realness is what you impose back.

Number eight inspired this list: ‘The earliest uses of writing were list-making and account-keeping.’

5.

Lists are linear and, as such, epitomise writing. Contrast the dreaded mind map. Asyndetic lists are best – they’re more listy.

6.

I should like to write a short memoir called My Life in Lists. I measure out my life in lists, and lists of lists. Because they impose order, I guess.

7.

You do too, at least to some extent. Diaries are fractal lists: you know of what each day, week, month consists; you measure out your life in lists.

8.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that ‘listless’ means ‘marked by languid indifference […] as to what one has to do’ (my emphasis). So ‘listless’ = ‘to-do-listless’. And yet the most important thing about items on a to-do list is doneness, at which point you’re listless once more. (Everyone’s to-do list has the same first and last items. Item number one, to quote the opening to David Copperfield: ‘ɪ ᴀᴍ ʙᴏʀɴ’.)

9.

The best lists are reading lists. I heard someone on Desert Island Discs – I can’t remember who – say that to do an English degree is to get a reading list for life. I like this, the way a book can wait on the shelf for years until you’re ready for it. I had this with Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield.

Incidentally, list of English authors to have produced a major long poem, a major play, and a major novel:

1. Oliver Goldsmith

2. Er, that’s it.

Desert Island Discs is itself a list of eight. Today, excluding Morrissey and Bob Dylan, to give everyone else a chance, mine are:

1. Cigarettes After Sex, ‘The Night Train’

2. Gram Parsons, ‘Streets of Baltimore’

3. The Velvet Underground, ‘Ride into the Sun’ (the version on Another View)

4. The Chameleons, ‘Swamp Thing’

5. Elvis, ‘Kentucky Rain’

6. The Jam, ‘Down in the Tube Station at Midnight’

7. Johnny Cash, ‘First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’

8. King Hannah, ‘It’s Me and You, Kid’

10.

But more to the point, what about Desert Island Lists? Don’t choose the Ten Commandments or Polonius’s precepts, because you get them in the Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Mine are:

1. Spenser’s ‘sylva’, or catalogue of trees, in The Faerie Queene:

The sayling Pine, the Cedar proud and tall,
The vine-propp Elme, the Poplar neuer dry,
The builder Oake, sole king of forrests all,
The Aspine good for staues, the Cypresse funerall.

The Laurell, meed of mightie Conquerours
And Poets sage, the Firre that weepeth still,
The Willow worne of forlorne Paramours,
The Eugh obedient to the benders will,
The Birch for shaftes, the Sallow for the mill,
The Mirrhe sweete bleeding in the bitter wound,
The warlike Beech, the Ash for nothing ill,
The fruitfull Oliue, and the Platane round,
The caruer Holme, the Maple seeldom inward sound. (I. i. 8–9)

2. Robinson Crusoe’s ‘miseries’ and ‘comforts’, in Chapter 4, his literal desert-island lists:

3. Tristram Shandy’s tolerant list of hobby horses, or ruling passions:

Sir, have not the wisest of men in all ages, not excepting Solomon himself,—have they not had their Hᴏʙʙʏ-Hᴏʀsᴇs;—their running horses,—their coins and their cockle-shells, their drums and their trumpets, their fiddles, their pallets,——their maggots and their butterflies?—and so long as a man rides his Hᴏʙʙʏ-Hᴏʀsᴇ peaceably and quietly along the King’s highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him,—pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it? (Volume 1, Chapter 7)

4. Ishmael’s ‘systematization of cetology’ (whale lore) in Moby-Dick:

According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary BOOKS (subdivisible into Cʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀs), and these shall comprehend them all, both small and large.

I. The Fᴏʟɪᴏ Wʜᴀʟᴇ; II. the Oᴄᴛᴀᴠᴏ Wʜᴀʟᴇ; III. the Dᴜᴏᴅᴇᴄɪᴍᴏ Wʜᴀʟᴇ.

As the type of the Fᴏʟɪᴏ I present the Sperm Whale; of the Oᴄᴛᴀᴠᴏ, the Grampus; of the Dᴜᴏᴅᴇᴄɪᴍᴏ, the Porpoise.

FOLIOS. Among these I here include the following chapters:—I. The Sperm Whale; II. the Right Whale; III. the Fin Back Whale; IV. the Hump-backed Whale; V. the Razor Back Whale; VI. the Sulphur Bottom Whale. (Chapter 32)

And so on, for ten pages.

5. Wilde’s preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, his tenets of ‘Unreality Hunger’:

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. […]

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. […]

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. […]

All art is at once surface and symbol.

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

6. Gatsby’s schedule and ‘general resolves’ (Chapter 9):

7. The Seven Commandments of Animal Farm (Chapter 2):

1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
2. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
3. No animal shall wear clothes.
4. No animal shall sleep in a bed.
5. No animal shall drink alcohol.
6. No animal shall kill any other animal.
7. All animals are equal.

These, of course, are later replaced by the much more succinct ‘ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.’

8. Finally, Carol Ann Duffy loves to put lists in her poems. This, from ‘John Barleycorn’ – he being a personification of barley-made beer – is a ‘taberna’, or catalogue of pubs.

He moved through Britain, bright and dark
like ale in glass. I saw him run across the fields
towards the Gamekeeper, the Poacher and the Blacksmith’s Arms.
He knew the Ram, the Lamb, the Lion and the Swan,
White Hart, Blue Boar, Red Dragon, Fox and Hounds.
I saw him in the Three Goats’ Heads,
the Black Bull and Dun Cow,
Shoulder of Mutton, Griffin, Unicorn,
green man, beer borne, good health, long life, John Barleycorn. (19–27)

I said at the start that writing emerged in Mesopotamia around five thousand years ago. A myth relating to this emergence involves Enmerkar, the King of Uruk, and his rival, the Lord of Aratta: ‘In the midst of completing several impossible tasks [before breakfast?], Enmerkar sends a herald with a written message to Aratta. Thus he invents writing’ (The Oxford Companion to World Mythology). In reality, we know that the earliest use of writing was in the making of lists, but I think the myth nevertheless says something profound about why we write anything, namely that we always do so in order to send a message of one kind or another.

In the seventeenth century, it is said, there was a dissociation of sensibility. The poets could no longer think and feel at the same time. Shakespeare could do it, the Metaphysicals could do it; they could write brainily about feeling and sex. But it went. The poets could no longer naturally think and feel at the same time.

All we are saying is that something analogous happened while the children of the Golden Age were becoming men and women. Feeling was already separated from thought. And then feeling was separated from sex.1

The main character is Keith,

And he didn’t always see things clearly. He got it completely wrong, for instance, about what everyone was calling free love – as a succession of horrified hippies could quietly attest. He thought it meant what it said; but it wasn’t love that was on offer[.]2

It was sex. So love was dissociated from sex, hence the inclusion in the novel of the (in my opinion never very funny) real-life Amis et al. game of taking titles and replacing ‘love’ with ‘hysterical sex’, which Christopher Hitchens also describes in Hitch-22, published in the same year: ‘“Hysterical Sex Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” […] “Hysterical Sex in a Cold Climate,” […] “Free Hysterical Sex,”’ etc.3 The well-known etymology of ‘hysterical’ (from ancient Greek, ‘suffering in the womb’), would not be worth mentioning except that sex in turn, the novel says, was dissociated from reproduction. Gloria Beautyman, with whom Keith becomes obsessed, ‘went at it as if the sexual act, in all human history, had never even been suspected of leading to childbirth’.4 Sex – ‘Normal reproductive intercourse’5 – was cut off from those things between which it had previously been sandwiched, love and children.

One of Amis’s epigraphs, and his title, is from the Russian writer Alexander Herzen:

The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.

The more well-known formulation is Gramsci’s: ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’ The point is that Keith and Gloria experienced the sexual revolution when it had ‘diffused its seminal energies in expansion, without pausing to secure its base’.6

So, was the sexual revolution a good thing? The problem with this question is that to answer it one would have to say whether the widow is still pregnantly interregnal – overdue, perhaps – or that the new world has been ‘born’ and can be critiqued, just like the old was. In 2010 Amis seems to have been saying that the revolution, which after all he called a ‘Golden Age’ and Wikipedia states is also known as the ‘sexual liberation’, was in principle a good thing but wasn’t done right or hadn’t finished; through, for example, a character called Silvia: ‘In her view, the first and possibly the only clause in the manifesto should have read as follows […] Fifty-fifty. All the boring shite with the house and the kids.’7 One counterview, familiar to denizens of Substackistan, is Louise Perry’s 2022 book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. However, this essay is not primarily concerned with defending or critiquing said revolution, but rather with exploring the connections between it and another area in which we encounter the dissociation of sex and love, even pleasure, and reproduction itself – dystopian fiction. I will argue that in both its Orwellian and Huxleyan forms this feature is not incidental. It might even be defining.

Both Amis and Louise Perry refer to the much-mythologised ‘May Events’ of 1968. In fact, both quote ‘The famous’ – and utopian – ‘slogan of the May 1968 student protests in Paris, “Il est interdit d’interdire!” (It is forbidden to forbid)’, Perry noting that its sentiment ‘has become remarkably mainstream in the decades since’.8 If it is forbidden to forbid sex, then there can be no prerequisites. But 1968 was also the year in which another and opposite slogan of sorts came in: The future is dystopian. Until then, the adjective had been applied to works of fiction, such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, but the 11 July issue of New Scientist contains a sentiment which has also become remarkably mainstream in the decades since: ‘It is […] pleasant […] to read some hope for our future, although […] I fear that our real future is more likely to be dystopian.’

To summarise, there was a revolution in the main thing we do (sex), which dissociated it from the highest value in which we believe (love); and, at the very same time, the idea of dystopia, a defining feature of which is precisely this dissociation, jumped the fiction–reality barrier. When any two things are dissociated a unity becomes a dualism, and I believe there is a relationship, as explored by Orwell and the rest, between this and dystopia, ‘A society (or state of society) in which conditions are extremely bad’.9

First, the Orwellian school, Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid’s Tale, in which sex is dissociated from love and – as if that weren’t enough – pleasure, so there is not even the consolation of being able to go-at-it the pain away like Gloria Beautyman.

1. The Orwellian School: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)

Orwell covers most of what needs to be said about sex in the state of Oceania in a single paragraph:

The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it. All marriages between Party members had to be approved by a committee appointed for the purpose, and – though the principle was never clearly stated – permission was always refused if the couple concerned gave the impression of being physically attracted to one another. The only recognised purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party. Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema. This again was never put into plain words, but in an indirect way it was rubbed into every Party member from childhood onwards. There were even organisations such as the Junior Anti-Sex League which advocated complete celibacy for both sexes. All children were to be begotten by artificial insemination (artsem, it was called in Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions.10

A certain amount of passion is channelled into the Two Minutes Hate – ‘it was impossible to avoid joining in’11 – and for the Proles there are the productions of Pornosec. But Winston Smith finds his accomplice, his fellow rebel for the cause of sex, in Julia, who hides in plain sight as a fanatical puritan:

She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick dark hair, a freckled face and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy. But this particular girl gave him the impression of being more dangerous than most. Once when they passed in the corridor she had given him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filled him with black terror.12

Eye contact is central in Nineteen Eighty-Four and here establishes, electrically, that Julia is dangerous, because, whatever the Party’s wishes, her suppression of the erotic is highly erotic (rather like Gloria’s incredibly modest swimsuits in The Pregnant Widow). It is not long before she sends Winston the note that initiates their affair. ‘I love you’, it says.13 But I’m not sure this bleak novel contains anything recognisable as love not connected to submission and power – recall the way its famous final sentence crowns the victory, won by fear, of the Ministry of Love.14 No, what Julia loves is sex. Adores it, in fact, as she tells Winston during their tryst in the country, and has done it with scores of Party members. It is this, her body count, that does most to turn Winston on, and in some ways the sex scene that follows is a sort of premonition of the sexual revolution and the idea of the personal as political:

‘Listen. The more men you’ve had, the more I love you. […] I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones. […] You like doing this? I don’t mean simply me: I mean the thing in itself?’

‘I adore it.’

That was above all what he wanted to hear. Not merely the love of one person, but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces. […] In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl’s body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.15

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopia in the Orwellian mode, but takes one idea – ‘The only recognised purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party’ – and makes it central. Because of a fertility crisis, the only recognised purpose of the entire state – the Republic of Gilead – is to beget children, hence the protagonist Offred’s role as Handmaid, which she glosses with the synecdoche, ‘We are two-legged wombs’.16

Perhaps because it is widely read in schools, there is a desire that the Tale be a highly relevant commentary on our own times, explaining developments such as the repeal of Roe v. Wade.17 Leaving aside how Yankified this is, the modern West is the product of the sexual revolution, not the Gileadean! I highly recommend an interview Atwood gave to Studs Terkel in 1986, in which she discusses her inspirations at length:

So women’s place is in the home in this regime. No exceptions. You can’t even have women on television saying women’s place is in the home. They’re not allowed publicly in any way, and that’s, by the way, much the way it is in a country like Iran these days.

One thing the world of The Handmaid’s Tale undoubtedly has in common with ours of unforbidden free-market sexuality is what I am arguing characterises dystopian fiction as such, namely the dissociation of sex and love. As with Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate, citizens of Gilead are required to join in with certain communal set pieces, and, like Winston, Offred finds it impossible not to join in with the ‘bloodlust’.18 But, meanwhile, sex takes a prescribed form intended to make lust impossible. Even if you haven’t read the Tale, you might have heard of the ‘Ceremony’, a ménage à trois of sorts involving Offred, the Commander, and his infertile wife, the third wheel whom Offred, with cruel irony, calls Serena Joy:

I lie on my back, fully clothed except for the healthy white cotton underdrawers. What I could see, if I were to open my eyes, would be the large white canopy of Serena Joy’s outsized colonial-style four-poster bed, suspended like a sagging cloud above us, a cloud sprigged with tiny drops of silver rain, which, if you looked at them closely, would turn out to be four-petalled flowers. […] Above me, towards the head of the bed, Serena Joy is arranged, outspread. Her legs are apart, I lie between them, my head on her stomach, her pubic bone under the base of my skull, her thighs on either side of me. She too is fully clothed.

My arms are raised; she holds my hands, each of mine in each of hers. This is supposed to signify that we are one flesh, one being. What it really means is that she is in control, of the process and thus of the product. If any. The rings of her left hand cut into my fingers. It may or may not be revenge.

My red skirt is hitched up to my waist, though no higher. Below it the Commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body. I do not say making love, because this is not what he’s doing. Copulating too would be inaccurate, because it would imply two people and only one is involved. Nor does rape cover it: nothing is going on here that I haven’t signed up for. There wasn’t a lot of choice but there was some, and this is what I chose.

Therefore I lie still and picture the unseen canopy over my head. I remember Queen Victoria’s advice to her daughter. Close your eyes and think of England.19

Interesting here, the emphasis on Offred’s closed eyes, because, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, eye contact in the Tale is the route to eroticism. The regime knows that love, as Shakespeare says in The Merchant of Venice, ‘is engendered in the eyes, [and] / With gazing fed’ (III. ii. 69–70), so it forbids Handmaids from making eye contact with men in the outside world – they wear ‘wings’, a wrap-around bonnet ‘to keep us from seeing, but also from being seen’.20 However, the danger created by this prohibition is the grit that makes the pearl. In Chapter 4, Offred and another Handmaid are stopped to have their passes checked by a couple of the policemen known as Guardians:

In returning my pass, the one with the peach-coloured moustache bends his head to try to get a look at my face. I raise my head a little, to help him, and he sees my eyes and I see his, and he blushes. […] He is the one who turns away.

It’s an event, a small defiance of rule, so small as to be undetectable, but such moments are the rewards I hold out for myself, like the candy I hoarded, as a child, at the back of a drawer. Such moments are possibilities, tiny peepholes.

What if I were to come at night, when he’s on duty alone – though he would never be allowed such solitude – and permit him beyond my white wings? What if I were to peel off my red shroud and show myself to him, to them, by the uncertain light of the lanterns? […] As we walk away I know they’re watching, these two men who aren’t yet permitted to touch women. They touch with their eyes instead and I move my hips a little, feeling the full red skirt sway around me. […] I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there. I hope they get hard at the sight of us and have to rub themselves against the painted barriers, surreptitiously.21

If you are wondering why Gilead doesn’t employ ‘artsem’, Atwood addressed this when answering a reader’s question on Twitter in 2018: ‘they are [biblical] literalists and don’t believe in ivf’. In fact, there’s nothing technologically futuristic about the Tale (the ‘Compu-’ coinages are half-hearted). Offred is ‘merely a usable body’, but usable for sexual reproduction, not as the source of some other type of commodity.22 The novel is social fiction, rather than science fiction, one of the things that distinguishes it from the Huxleyan mode of dystopia.

2. The Huxleyan School: Never Let Me Go (2005) and Brave New World (1932)

Whereas in the two Orwellian novels people have sex to reproduce but don’t enjoy it, in the Huxleyan ones they have sex for pleasure but not to reproduce. Huxley said that the theme of his Brave New World is ‘the advancement of science as it affects human individuals’, and I suspect this is why in recent years people have tended to follow Neil Postman in finding it more pertinent to our time than Nineteen Eighty-Four.23 At the ‘end of history’, with the great ideological clash of the twentieth century having fallen away, we’re left with human nature and our ability to invent ways of being that tie it in knots, often in pursuit of being happier or at least more efficient and rational. Brave New World, as Jenny Stringer et al. point out, is as much ‘anti-utopian satire’ as dystopia, ‘originally conceived as a parody of H. G. Wells’s Men like Gods’:

[I]t describes a scientifically determined future where history and the family have been abolished, and Henry Ford is the deity. Reproduction takes place in bottles by ‘Bokanovsky’s Process’ [a kind of cloning]; humans are graded from Alphas to Epsilons, subjected to neo-Pavlovian conditioning, and take their places in a utilitarian World State manipulated by Controllers.24

The World State possesses much better tech than Orwell’s shabby, Sovietised post-war London. It has a ‘Designed by Apple in California’ feel, unlike those telescreens, which one senses might go on the blink any time, if only Winston could tell when.

Brave New World initiated what I am calling the Huxleyan school, but for reasons that I hope will become clear I will start with another example, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, whose characters are part of a utopian experiment of sorts and whose end-of-history setting is ‘England, late 1990s’.

The narrator is Kathy H., and she and her friends are infertile clones, bred in order to be organ ‘donors’ (they don’t actually have a choice). They are, as it were, the Epsilons of their society, though just as human – all too human – as non-clones. From the time they are in their twenties, they can expect a series of operations to harvest their organs, which weakens and eventually kills them. This is known as ‘completing’, and usually occurs by the time they are in their early thirties. Their short lives comprise two halves, one relatively innocent and one involving sex, but having in common the attempt to prove a personhood that might permit the avoidance of their fate.

Most clones grow up in ‘deplorable conditions’, but as children Kathy and her friend-cum-soulmate Tommy attend Hailsham, a progressive boarding school and, as such, utopian enclave within the broader dystopian reality.25 Describing the school, Kathy naively capitalises phrases like ‘Art Room’ and ‘North Playing Field’, over-reifying the ways of the institution, as elite schools tend to, and contributing to its mystique as microcosm.26 What makes Hailsham unusual is that it gives the clones a humane education, as one of the teachers, Miss Emily, later explains, after the school has been shut down:

You see, we were able to give you something, something which even now no one will ever take from you, and we were able to do that principally by sheltering you. Hailsham would not have been Hailsham if we hadn’t. Very well, sometimes that meant we kept things from you, lied to you. Yes, in many ways we fooled you. I suppose you could even call it that. But we sheltered you during those years, and we gave you your childhoods.27

This is an example of Ishiguro’s subtle art – you might spot others in what follows. He describes the way things are in his dystopian fiction, and then you re-read it and he’s just describing life.

The Hailsham approach is typified by the way the students are encouraged to create art for a mysterious ‘Gallery’. Miss Emily again:

We selected the best of it and put on special exhibitions. In the late seventies, at the height of our influence, we were organising large events all around the country. There’d be cabinet ministers, bishops, all sorts of famous people coming to attend. There were speeches, large funds pledged. “There, look!” we could say. “Look at this art! How dare you claim these children are anything less than fully human?”28

Through Tommy’s wishful thinking – he and Kathy would love each other forever, if only they could – the Gallery gets mixed up with a myth about so-called ‘deferrals’, whereby Hailsham students could get their first donation delayed so long as they ‘qualified’. While at the ‘Cottages’ – the converted farm they’re moved to, aged sixteen – Tommy convinces himself and Kathy that to qualify for deferral clones have to be in love, and that the art was intended to test this. Miss Emily, he claims, at a certain point let it slip:

She told Roy that things like pictures, poetry, all that kind of stuff, she said they revealed what you were like inside. She said they revealed your soul.’ […]

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I remember. So what are you getting at?’

‘What I think,’ said Tommy slowly, ‘is this. Suppose it’s true, what the veterans are saying. Suppose some special arrangement has been made for Hailsham students. Suppose two people say they’re truly in love, and they want extra time to be together. Then you see, Kath, there has to be a way to judge if they’re really telling the truth. That they aren’t just saying they’re in love, just to defer their donations. You see how difficult it could be to decide? Or a couple might really believe they’re in love, but it’s just a sex thing. Or just a crush. You see what I mean, Kath? It’ll be really hard to judge, and it’s probably impossible to get it right every time. But the point is, whoever decides, Madame or whoever it is, they need something to go on.’29

Being ‘in love’ is dissociated from sex, and in a way that resembles the sexual revolution more closely than the Orwellian scenario, reducing the latter to ‘just a sex thing’ – ‘the old in-out in-out’, to quote A Clockwork Orange, another superb dystopian novel. I said above that the clones experience a period of innocence at Hailsham, but it’s a short one, because sex education begins when they are thirteen; and, because they’re infertile – ‘we couldn’t have babies’30 – they are encouraged to treat it casually. By the time they are sixteen, Kathy says, ‘sex had got like “being creative” had been a few years earlier. It felt like if you hadn’t done it yet, you ought to, and quickly.’31 Miss Emily injects a bit of Louise Perry into the sex lectures, warning the students that ‘sex affects emotions in ways you’d never expect’,32 and so this awareness of there being a relationship between feeling and sex exists alongside a post-sexual revolution casualness:

I started to think I wouldn’t mind having sex with a boy. Not just to see what it was like, but also because it occurred to me I needed to get familiar with sex, and it would be just as well to practise first with a boy I didn’t care about too much. Then later on, if I was with someone special, I’d have more chance of doing everything right.33

Someone special with whom she was ‘truly in love’. Later, she and Tommy do start having sex, in case ‘we did find ourselves going for a deferral’.34 But of course true love is not dissociated from sex – it is its context – and so Kathy and Tommy are never able to graduate from a fairly naive idea of what love is: ‘if you were a boy and a girl, and you were in love with each other, really, properly in love, and if you could show it, then the people who run Hailsham, they sorted it out for you.’35

To make art, to be in love – these define the purview of human being, which in Christian and broadly deontological ethics it is forbidden to use as the means to an end. But as with all dystopias, the world of Never Let Me Go operates on the split-and-save ethic of utilitarianism. The clones are infertile. Sex is consequence-free, can be had for pleasure alone where no love is, and therefore cannot prove the clones’ humanity, even if their lives are at stake. Sex is dissociated from love and not therefore evidence of it. How would you plead personhood if love were inadmissible? This is the clones’ Kafkan kismet. And, in any case, deferrals aren’t actually a thing, which eventually Kathy and Tommy are forced to realise, hence what Mark Currie refers to as ‘the novel’s dark, even despairing, moral tone’.36 From a semi-utopian boarding school, to free sex, to despair. As Kathy says in Chapter 16, something of a turning point, ‘I remember a huge tiredness coming over me, a kind of lethargy in the face of the tangled mess before me.’37 Again, is this simply Ishiguro describing the burden of ensouledness?

Love is the desire to say ‘Never let me go and I’ll never let you go’, and the novel is about the conquering by death of that eponymous sentiment. Madame, who founded Hailsham with Miss Emily, knows this when she happens to see the young Kathy holding an imaginary baby to her breast and swaying along to a song with the refrain ‘Oh baby, baby, never let me go’:

She was out in the corridor, standing very still, her head angled to one side to give her a view of what I was doing inside. And the odd thing was she was crying. It might even have been one of her sobs that had come through the song to jerk me out of my dream.

When I think about this now, it seems to me, even if she wasn’t a guardian, she was the adult, and she should have said or done something, even if it was just to tell me off. Then I’d have known how to behave. But she just went on standing out there, sobbing and sobbing[.]38

Years later, when Tommy is nearing completion and Kathy is his carer, he says to her,

I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it’s just too much. The current’s too strong. They’ve got to let go, drift apart.39

We want to believe, to quote Philip Larkin, that ‘What will survive of us is love’, but this appears to be difficult when it is dissociated from the subject of his other most famous poem. Martin Amis opens The Pregnant Widow like this:

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    Sexual intercourse began
    In 1963
    (Which was rather late for me) –
    Between the end of the Chatterley ban
    And the Beatles’ first LP.

Philip Larkin, ‘Annus Mirabilis’ (formerly ‘History’), Cover Magazine, February 1968

But now it was the summer of 1970, and sexual intercourse was well advanced.40

The final dystopian novel I will discuss was written the longest ago, and yet is the most far-sighted about the advances of sexual intercourse, which – in Brave New World – was ‘invented’ not in 1963 but in the year of our Ford 150, c. 2058 in old money.

I’ve saved Brave New World to the end because in many ways it is the most futuristic and conceptually cleanest of the dystopias. The state is not one among many, like Atwood’s Gilead, because there is a single World State. ‘Artsem’ is not an aspiration, like in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but the only method of reproduction, full stop. Not that we necessarily want to hand it to Huxley, who, unlike Orwell, was with the intellectuals rather than the masses, and has more than a smack of Bloomsbury, but to have written Brave New World in 1931 is remarkable. In 2007 Atwood herself wrote a new introduction, calling it

either a perfect-world utopia or its nasty opposite, a dystopia, depending on your point of view: its inhabitants are beautiful, secure, and free from diseases and worries, though in a way we like to think we would find unacceptable.41

Given that the sexual revolution was utopian, it makes sense that the aptest critique of it be anti-utopian. One of Huxley’s points, Atwood goes on to say, is that ‘in a world in which everything is available, nothing has any meaning.’42 Self-professed Romantic Harold Bloom agrees with this, calling the novel ‘a vision of […] a world without authentic belief and spiritual values.’43

In The Handmaid’s Tale the authoritarian Aunt Lydia makes reference to Isaiah Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’: ‘There is more than one kind of freedom […] Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.’44 In the time before Gilead, when Offred was growing up – the time of the sexual revolution – people had freedom to: ‘It is forbidden to forbid’. But Aunt Lydia’s Louise Perry-like point is that women didn’t necessarily have freedom from the risks entailed by a hyper-liberal attitude to sex. The ingenious exaggeration of Huxley’s vision is that citizens of the World State have freedom from risk, hunger, etc., and freedom to do what they like, including sexually, but they have been engineered not to want to engage, or even be capable of engaging, in any problematic activities such as love- and reproduction-associated sex. It is one of Huxley’s strokes of genius to make ‘mother’ the worst profanity – an M-word, if you will. Offred and Winston are oppressed, and feel that they are oppressed. The clones in Never Let Me Go create art that proves their personhood, and yet are denied that personhood. In Brave New World, all this kind of thing has been rationalised away. Making a similar point to Wittgenstein’s that even if a lion could talk we could not understand him, the World Controller explains that even if the people read a Shakespearean tragedy, they could not understand it:

[Y]ou can’t make tragedies without social instability. The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. They’re well off; they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there’s soma [‘a narcotic drug which produces euphoria and hallucination, distributed by the state in order to promote content and social harmony’ (OED)] […] that’s the price we have to pay for stability. You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead.45

A nineteenth-century history of ideas might be seen as a great battle between Romantics and utilitarians, with a figure like J. S. Mill attempting to split the difference – ‘It is better to be […] Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied’ – and George Eliot making humanistic religion out of high art. Huxley, born in 1894, presents us with the categorical victory of the utilitarians: far better to be a fool satisfied than a human being in pursuit of the association of love, sex, pleasure, and reproduction, and therefore perpetually dissatisfied. No ideology, no mess, just pleasure. Epsilons are not tortured by unrequited love or thwarted creativity; they are bred to be incapable of either. Brave New World depicted ‘The Rise of the Meritocracy’ almost thirty years before Michael Young published his book of that name. If I can paraphrase Neil Postman’s famous comparison, what Orwell feared were those who would ban normal reproductive intercourse based on love. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban normal reproductive intercourse based on love, for there would be no one who wanted to engage in it. Which leaves sex undertaken for pleasure only, in the depiction of which Brave New World’s prophetic qualities are ageing like fine soma.

Disturbingly, the World State sexualises children from a much younger age than Hailsham, encouraging them in ‘rudimentary sexual game[s]’.46 Remember that sexual revolution is a many-splendoured thing, encompassing age-of-consent reform as well as Wilhelm Reich’s orgone accumulator. But moving swiftly on, sex in Brave New World is, in a word, to employ an Amisism coined by Keith in The Pregnant Widow, ‘pornoid’.47 ‘Everyone belongs to everyone else’.48 The greatest compliment that can be paid to a woman is to call her ‘pneumatic’, meaning large-bosomed, a humorous sense of the word Huxley must have got from the short story writer O. Henry, or perhaps from T. S. Eliot (‘Uncorseted, her friendly bust / Gives promise of pneumatic bliss’). Keith complains about an earlier girlfriend that she always seemed to have her pants on: ‘I kept telling her, It’s 1968, for Christ’s sake. I kept bending her ear about the sexual revolution.’ But by the time of the novel’s setting sex is well advanced and women wear ‘cool pants’. ‘The cool thing about cool pants is you know they’re coming off.’49 Cool pants or, as Huxley calls them, ‘zippicamiknicks’.50 Sex in the World State is just as Keith says it will be: ‘In the future […] sex will be play […] A play of surfaces and sensations.’51 And, at the heart of Huxley’s pornoid state is the equivalent of Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate, except it is perhaps even more difficult to avoid joining in. I am speaking of the Solidarity Service and its irresistible chant of ‘orgy-porgy’:

Round they went, a circular procession of dancers, each with hands on the hips of the dancer preceding, round and round, shouting in unison, stamping to the rhythm of the music with their feet, beating it, beating it out with hands on the buttocks in front; twelve pairs of hands beating as one; as one, twelve buttocks slabbily resounding. Twelve as one, twelve as one. ‘I hear him, I hear him coming.’ The music quickened; faster beat the feet, faster, faster fell the rhythmic hands. And all at once a great synthetic bass boomed out the words which announced the approaching atonement and final consummation of solidarity […] ‘Orgy-porgy,’ it sang, while the tom-toms continued to beat their feverish tattoo:52

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    Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun,
    Kiss the girls and make them One.
    Boys at one with girls at peace;
    Orgy-porgy gives release.

All of which is to say that among the four dystopian novels discussed, Huxley gives us the uncanniest premonition of the sexual revolution, forty years before the fact. Not sex qua political act, but sex qua sex, dissociated from love and reproduction, but also lacking, at least in Brave New World, any hint of eroticism. This is certainly the case in the pilot episode (as far as I got) of the porny 2020 TV adaptation – being kind, the orgy scene might have been cleverly intentionally unerotic. The erotic being inversely proportional to an emphasis on pleasure alone – I’m not sure this even is a paradox. In his wonderful memoir I Put a Spell on You John Burnside associates the erotic with peril.53 Perhaps the erotic even requires an awareness of death, reproduction’s other. In Nineteen Eighty-Four there is a gritty dust in the mechanism of existence; Huxley’s Brave New World is fully-lubed-up luxury communism.

Hobbes famously described the life of man in the state of nature as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. We are in no such state, but if we fear that the future is dystopian, it appears we have a choice. Solitary and long are givens, but what else does life have in store? The Orwellian – poor and nasty, but with the consolation of brutish sex – or the Huxleyan: rich, nice, and pornoid.

Premature Ejaculation, or, an Abrupt Conclusion

Amis doesn’t mention him, but the dubious theory of a seventeenth-century dissociation of sensibility belongs to T. S. Eliot (‘Uncorseted, her friendly bust’); dubious partly because of his characteristic blind spot when it comes to Romanticism, which, as Frank Kermode rightly points out, has as one of its ideals the very ‘sensuous apprehension of thought’ that Eliot claims disappeared after Donne.54 Leaving Eliot, what I have tried to argue is that dystopianism is a dualism with a remarkable amount in common with its seeming opposite, the forbidless world of sexual liberation. It seems that whether everything is forbidden or ‘do what thou wilt’ is the whole of the law, love and sex drift apart. Perhaps authoritarianism and hyper-liberalism both preclude anything genuinely voluntary, sex-in-love being paradigmatically that.

The antidote, if there is one, to dualist dystopia has to be a monist utopia. That is, one that does not dissect or dissociate a unity like love and sex, and thereby destine itself to tend towards dystopia. Not Wellsian sci-fi or free love, but the original utopian thinking, good old-fashioned Romanticism, wonderfully evoked by M. H. Abrams:

Prominent in Wordsworth […] is his version of the great commonplace of the age: unity with himself and his world is the primal and normative state of man, of which the sign is a fullness of shared life and the condition of joy; analytic thought divides the mind from nature and object from object, and this division, if absolute, kills the object it severs and threatens with spiritual death the mind from which it has been severed.55

Wordsworth’s masterwork ‘The Recluse’ ‘was […] to have been no less than the catalyst for the regaining of paradise.’56

Romantics may be solitary, but they can at least imagine sex-in-love, relationship, and wholeness. We are all internalised, but some of us are looking at the quest-romance.

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It’s funny that Twitter discourse can now find its way into appointment TV. (Bosh.)

The cats are human, of course: ‘We’ll all be dead soon.’ ‘Yep.’

The background art is quite beautiful – contemporary UK, warts and all (up to a point). (Incidentally, did you see his Dutch Barn Vodka ‘ad’, which said ‘THE SLOW RETURN TO SANITY IS SENDING SOME PEOPLE ABSOLUTELY MENTAL’?) The garages where Gus’s mum dies look like Scenes from the Passion: Late (2002) by George Shaw.

Gervais is Gus, but he’s Ponce too, with his natural history facts.

Obsessions became entrenched (‘full-blown AIDS’) and idle thoughts residing concerns many years ago. But I’m sticking with my comparison with Martin Amis, of whom someone in the London Review of Books said, he ‘could chuck more or less anything on a piece of paper and it would look good and seem to be interesting, up to a certain point.’ It doesn’t sound like a compliment, but the thing is you have to be that writer in the first place for someone to pay you such a backhander.

The first series of The Ricky Gervais Show on XFM – peak radio – ended with ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ by the Smiths, so it’s nice to hear it here, in Episode 4 – problematic Gervais and he who must not be named on 6 Music, even though he invented them, problematic Morrissey, who will bury his undertakers. And it’s a clever use of the song: ‘And if a double-decker bus crashes into us’ etc. Gus and Lara get run over by the bus, and the ten-ton truck, but they’re OK because they’re cats with nine lives.

Even Gervais is acknowledging the passing into history of New Atheism by having his feline avatar pray.

The ending is surely inspired by ‘Karl’s Mam’s Dog Story’, from S02E43 of XFM! ‘The [story] that was really good was about a kid who gets a dog, but it’s quite an old dog, and he’s playing with the dog, and that, but it starts to get a bit old – about fifteen, or whatever – and he goes, “Oh, it’s rubbish, this dog […] I’m sick of it.” […] So she [his mam] goes, “Oh, all right, then. We’ll get you another one.”’

This is an addendum to my essay arguing that Gervais is a modern-day Dickens.

Oft I’d been told of the city of Priam
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Nolan speak out loud his BRAAAM.1

The Book Club

The Book Club strictly covers novels, so they did Madeline Miller’s 2018 Circe.

The LRB Podcast

This interview accompanies Emily Wilson’s much-referenced review of the film.

The Symbolic World

This is my favourite because Pageau’s analysis is unpredictable. The keynote is ‘Christopher Nolan definitely knows what he’s doing.’

Non-Odyssean pods

Conversations with Tyler

How I Write

My favourite line from David Sedaris here is his chastening observation, ‘Just because this happened to me doesn’t make it interesting.’

The Lit Path

The Lit Path

Ep#2: What I Wish I Knew Sooner about the Joys of Reading, with Ioan Marc Jones

On this second episode of The Lit Path, Ioan Marc Jones ( Quiet books) sits down with the podcast’s host and producer Jack Aldane to tell his story about growing up in pursuit of his father’s literary approval. This is a conversation about how fathers work hard to set the bar, how sons even harder to raise it, and the hard lessons that are often learned along the …

Listen now

2 months ago · 5 likes · Jack Aldane

The London Review Bookshop Podcast

Home is a question mark. Until next month.

In his 1950 paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Alan Turing began with the question ‘Can machines think?’, but, finding it ‘too meaningless to deserve discussion’, instead proposed his ‘imitation game’, more often called the Turing test, to pass which a computer would have to be indistinguishable from a human on the basis of its replies to a series of questions.1 What the paper seeks to answer instead, therefore, is ‘Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?’ He believes the answer is yes and that in the not too distant future ‘one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted’.2 OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, and a year later its CEO Sam Altman made an observation that has since become a commonplace: ‘the turing test went whooshing by and everyone mostly went about their lives’. This means either we’re back, in effect, to asking the question Turing rejected – ‘But is ChatGPT actually thinking?’ – or we must come up with better questions. I believe doing so should begin with something Turing does not address, namely the nature of what is being imitated, or, in other words, what it is to be human.

Fair enough for him not to address it, one might say; such a philosophical question does not deserve discussion in an article about computers (though it was published in Mind). The closest Turing gets to humanistic considerations is to quote, in order to argue against, the neurosurgeon Geoffrey Jefferson, who said, ‘Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain’.3 This Turing labels ‘The Argument from Consciousness’. And just as I think he outs himself as a blank-slatist when he compares a child’s brain to a notebook,4 I cheerfully out myself as a squishy humanist when I say that Jefferson was right then and is right still that machine ≠ brain. No matter how well a stick insect imitates a stick, the nature of the latter remains a separate question. The name’s consciousness. Hard problem of consciousness.

This essay proposes, now that we’re living with AI, to check in with the ancient question of human nature, with the expectation that doing so will tell us about what AI might yet do and about ourselves.

The Imagination Game

In 1926, a quarter of a century before Turing’s paper, when he himself was just fourteen, the Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen published a short story, ‘The Visitor’, in which she coined another term for another game, and a harder one for a computer to play.

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In the mid-1790s, between his return from revolutionary France and the writing of the poems for which he is known, there is an episode in the life of William Wordsworth that goes by many names. It was a ‘period of dejection’, ‘moral nihilism’, ‘anguished soul-searching’, ‘near breakdown’, ‘mental breakdown’.1 There are also various characterisations of these as ‘crisis years’.2 Wordsworth is said to have experienced crises ‘mental’, ‘emotional’, ‘moral’, and ‘intellectual’; a ‘crisis of dejection’, ‘of despair’, ‘of profession’; a ‘life-crisis’.3 And perhaps, one might add, a meaning crisis. As one critic puts it, Wordsworth had ‘felt emotionally wedded to the destiny of France’4, so his return to London, France’s declaration of war against Britain, and then the Terror, constituted the removal of his source of meaning, the ‘master light’ of all his seeing, to borrow a coinage from the ‘Intimations of Immortality’ ode (155).

Two decades later, in 1814, Wordsworth published The Excursion, Being a Portion of The Recluse, whose central character, the Solitary, is defined by a ‘despondency’ partly drawn from Wordsworth’s own. The Excursion was to be the middle section of a three-part epic called ‘The Recluse’, which Samuel Taylor Coleridge hoped would help ‘those, who, in consequence of the complete failure of the French Revolution, have thrown up all hopes of the amelioration of mankind’.5 One of Wordsworth’s biographers states that ‘[‘The Recluse’] was, in short, to have been no less than the catalyst for the regaining of paradise.’6 Though Wordsworth spent more than half of his long life writing or thinking about writing ‘The Recluse’, it is well known that he did not complete the other parts.7 Nonetheless, The Excursion is his longest poem and his only long poem to be read by the younger Romantics. Unlike The Prelude it was published in time to find fit audience among his contemporaries: Shelley read it within a month or two, and Keats in the autumn of 1816.8 It was a coming-of-age book for both poets – indeed Keats might have read from it on his twenty-first birthday – and there is widespread agreement about its influence on the works that they would go on to write. This thesis will therefore make the argument that the major Romantic poems of the Regency decade can be traced in part to a mental health crisis suffered by an unknown disillusioned revolutionary called William Wordsworth, and to his later attempt to write through despondency and in pursuit of happiness, both for his own sake and on behalf of his generation.

A brief discussion of terminology is necessary, since ‘despondency’ and ‘happiness’ are not the only words used by the poets discussed in this thesis for what modern psychologists would more dryly call ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ affect.9 Wordsworth refers to his ‘two natures […] joy the one / The other melancholy’ (Prelude, X. 868–69). Keats says that the ‘Wherein lies happiness?’ passage of Endymion (I. 777–842), ‘set before [him] the gradations of Happiness even like a kind of Pleasure Thermometer—and [was his] first Step towards the chief Attempt in the Drama—the playing of different Natures with Joy and Sorrow.’10 Already we have multiple synonyms – albeit with differing connotations – even before consulting the critics and learning that ‘“Hope” and “joy,” as against “despair” and “dejection,” was a central and recurrent antithesis in Romantic poetry’, but that ‘the tranquillity Wordsworth celebrates in The Prelude is his master emotion’, which he also ‘calls variously serenity […] or calm’.11 Wanting to avoid producing a thesis on Romantic poetry full of references to negative and positive affect, I refer, in my title and throughout, to despondency and happiness.

I most often use ‘despondency’ – as opposed to ‘melancholy’, ‘sorrow’, ‘despair’, or ‘dejection’ – simply because it is Wordsworth’s word in The Excursion, Books III and IV being ‘Despondency’ and ‘Despondency Corrected’. It is also legitimate to gloss it, and the ‘crisis’ terms above, with the standard, modern word ‘depression’, both on the grounds of critical precedent and because in the ‘Summary of Contents’ Wordsworth himself refers to the Solitary’s ‘depression of mind’.12 The thesis make no claims about what might have been diagnosable as what is now called ‘clinical depression’, and I do not believe that this can finally be distinguished from the more general sense of ‘depression’ – ‘The condition of being depressed in spirits; dejection’ (OED) – except by the judgements involved in diagnosis.

‘Happiness’ is potentially more fraught. As one scholar of religion puts it, ‘The central disagreement is over whether happiness properly refers to an immediate psychological state (akin to cheerfulness or sadness, for example) or whether it is the more sustained sense of a life that is lived well (akin to well-being or flourishing) […] eudaimonia’.13 However, this flexibility is what makes it the best word for the positive good sought by those on a quest to correct despondency, for the despondent seeks to ‘live on earth a life of happiness’, as Margaret in Book I of The Excursion might have done (I. 550), but frequently must settle for something more temporary, as when Wordsworth returned to Esthwaite Water during his summer vacation: ‘If ever happiness hath lodg’d with man, / That day consummate happiness was mine’ (Prelude, IV. 129–30). Just as Coleridge said, using the same metaphor, that despair can enter one’s heart ‘merely as a Lodger’ or ‘as a Tenant for Life’, happiness too can be an immediate psychological state akin to cheerfulness, or a more sustained sense of well-being.14

As we shall see, our three poets had different relationships with these varieties of happiness. Wordsworth was ‘not used to make / A present joy the matter of [his] Song’ (Prelude, I. 55–56), and lived long enough to enjoy the accretion of beneficial memories, ascend steadily from days of happiness towards well-being, and, in perceiving the view, to lend it ‘a sober colouring from an eye / That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality’ (‘Intimations’, 200–01). In the passage quoted above about his two natures, joy and melancholy, he goes on to say that in spite of the latter he was ‘withal / A happy man’ (X. 869–70). Walter Pater thought that ‘There was in [Wordsworth’s] own character a certain contentment’;15 that is, like Margaret, his ‘temper had been framed, as if to make / A Being—who […] Might live on earth a life of happiness’ (emphasis added) (Excursion, I. 549–50). Meanwhile Shelley, in his mature poetry, places a particular emphasis, in the words of M. H. Abrams, on pursuing ‘social regeneration and happiness’.16 And Keats – notably in ‘To Autumn’ – was used to make the present moment, albeit slowed and extended, the matter of his song. With the word ‘happy’, he often uses the immediate form of repetition known as epizeuxis – ‘happy, happy’ – as if willing himself to be happy in the happiness of the tree and brook ‘In drear nighted December’, glowing fire in ‘Song of Four Fairies’, Psyche, or the Grecian urn.17 But, as I will argue, both Shelley and Keats were, with Wordsworth, eudaemonists in Thomas De Quincey’s sense, ‘hanker[ing] […] after a state of happiness, both for [themselves] and others’.18

Moreover, this state is not a castle in the air but, as Wordsworth says in ‘London, 1802’, the ‘ancient English dower / Of inward happiness’ (5–6). Abrams calls it ‘the great commonplace of the age’, ‘Prominent in Wordsworth’, that ‘unity with himself and his world is the primal and normative state of man, of which the sign is a fullness of shared life and the condition of joy’.19 Wordsworth and the younger poets he influenced wrote intimations of immortality but also intimations of mortal happiness. Their quest was not for permanently sustained cheerfulness, which would misunderstand the distinction quoted above, but to raise the reading given by Keats’s ‘Pleasure Thermometer’ via a continual progress towards and through gradations of happiness. As we shall find in Chapter 2, the Solitary is not cured of his despondency, and so the meaning of Wordsworth’s ‘Corrected’, in practice, partakes of senses such as ‘amended’, ‘advised’, and ‘counteracted’ (OED). Similarly, Chapter 4 argues that even the Keats of Endymion, with its hero’s ‘quest for happiness’,20 implies that what is feasible in this world is the palliation of despondency, ‘the playing of different Natures with Joy and Sorrow’ so as to promote the former. Abrams states,

These writers, whatever their religious creed or lack of creed, were all, in Keats’s term, humanists. They posited the central importance and essential dignity of man (including, Wordsworth especially insisted, the lowly, helpless, and outcast man); they set as the aim of man an abundant life in this world, in which he may give play to all his creative powers; they estimated poetry by the extent to which it contributes toward this aim[.]21

I try to show, throughout the thesis, just how the poems discussed do contribute towards this aim, as both message and medium. The Wanderer delivers propositions against despondency, but, as importantly, to quote the editors of an anthology produced by the Bibliotherapy Foundation, ‘the rhythms of a good poem may be inherently calming and therapeutic’, and thereby combat despondency in non-propositional ways.22 I return to this in my chapter about Keats, and, in the conclusion, specifically poetry’s capacity to reconciles stasis and process. But the story begins with The Excursion, a work whose origins lie in possibly the most ambitious plan in literary history to write poetry that promotes ‘an abundant life in this world, in which [man] may give play to all his creative powers’.

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The original reception of The Excursion

Just as no poetry could quite live up to the idea of ‘The Recluse’, The Excursion when published – in early August 1814 or slightly earlier – was unlikely to live up to its author’s hopes.23 It was a large, expensive book (two guineas) and sold as it had been written and must be read – slowly. It also generated what must be one of the most famous sentences in the tradition of the pan: Francis Jeffrey’s thundering trochaic, ‘This will never do.’ Of course it also elicited plenty of appreciative comment. Even Jeffrey finds ‘considerable force of writing and tenderness of sentiment’ in Book III, the Solitary’s explanation of his own despondency:

Mr Wordsworth delineates only feelings – and all his adventures are of the heart. The narrative […] given by the sufferer himself, is, in our opinion, the most spirited and interesting part of the poem. […] it indicates a fine perception of the secret springs of character and emotion, to choose a being so circumstanced as the most ardent votary of that far-spread enthusiasm [the French Revolution].24

The Critical Heritage captures a dozen reviews and notices published by the end of 1815.25 Hazlitt, for example, was violently ambivalent, as it were praising with fierce damns. In the first sentence of his review he states that ‘in the depth of feeling, at once simple and sublime […] this work has seldom been surpassed’; yet in the pages that follow he levels a series of devastating barbs, the most famous of which is that in The Excursion ‘An intense intellectual egotism swallows up every thing.’26 And there are yet more uncollected responses to find. An unsigned notice in the liberal Morning Chronicle states that ‘the profoundest reasonings are poured forth in the plainest language’.27 Another unsigned notice, in the conservative Morning Post, is both more laudatory and more intriguingly perceptive:

[The Excursion] is written with such spirit and truth, that, next to the gratification of sharing in the excursion itself, must be that of perusing this record of it. But, with all the attractions of vivid and eloquent description, it has still a higher zest: the emotions of the Poet are fruitful in producing a multitude of kindred feelings […] The Excursion, it must be observed, is a distinct portion of a Philosophical Poem embracing […] grand topics […] The conception of such a work is grand, daring, and original: and the execution of it, if we may judge from this finished specimen, will raise the Author to a station unoccupied by any Poet ancient or modern. […] surely there can be no higher style of poetry than that which extends the sphere of contemplation[.]28

Coleridge is not known to have reviewed The Excursion, though he did write frequently for the Post.

The reception of most interest for this thesis is that of Shelley and Keats. The well-known responses that have come down to us suggest that Keats found it a work ‘to rejoice at’, whereas the Shelleys were ‘much disappointed’ with Wordsworth’s apparent apostasy.29 But more important than this seeming polarisation is the ways in which both Shelley and Keats took imaginative receipt of The Excursion and engaged with its central concerns, including solitude and despondency.

The Excursion after The Prelude (1850–1950)

Seven editions of The Excursion were published during Wordsworth’s lifetime – the last was part of the six-volume Poetical Works of 1849–50 – and it is well known that the poem achieved popularity with Victorian readers.30 Its decline began with Matthew Arnold’s 1879 selection of Wordsworth’s poems, with its emphasis on shorter lyrical works, and accelerated towards the end of the century.31 As the Cornell editors put it, this was ‘almost certainly related to the increasing popularity of The Prelude, which has dominated study of Wordsworth’s longer poetry every since.’32

It is also well known that, as Kenneth Johnston and Gene Ruoff put it, Wordsworth ‘was not much in favor with the New Critics […] who favored in general a tight, dry, ironic, “modernist” sensibility of the sort exemplified by T. S. Eliot’. Happily,

since then, Wordsworth’s poetry has been massively reinterpreted by a wide variety of astute and subtle critics until he sometimes seems the very paradigm of another kind of modernism than the New Critics liked to recognize: that is, the sensibility ill at ease with the modern world but striving, against all odds and sometimes even against itself, to make affirmative, forward-looking statements of “something evermore about to be.”33

The post-Prelude century was capped by the publication in 1950 of the first book-length study of The Excursion, by Judson Stanley Lyon, which begins with the words, ‘The Excursion has long been generally neglected’. Lyon notes that ‘Wordsworth criticism for the last twenty-five years has repudiated Arnold’, but by ‘[concerning] itself mainly with The Prelude’.34 In the very broadest terms, as the Cornell editors suggest, this has remained the case for the three-quarters of a century following Lyon. A non-quantitative but striking illustration of this is the downright inaccessibility of the poem. Consider for a moment that William Wordsworth’s major work – on grounds of length, influence and, at least in parts, quality – is unavailable from any of the usual publishers. This of course is not the case for Jerusalem, Biographia Literaria, Don Juan, Prometheus Unbound, or any of Keats’s longer poems. In fact, when one recalls the original two-guinea price tag and that every subsequent edition published in Wordsworth’s lifetime contained at least minor revisions, it might be the case that the 1814 text read by Shelley and Keats has never been accessible as an affordable book. This is a sad irony, given Wordsworth’s democratic hopes that The Excursion would, as I outline at the start of Chapter 2, benefit mankind individually and collectively, and is in part why I quote from the poem extensively in that chapter.

A Romantic revival, the Yale English department, Harold Bloom

Lyon undertook his PhD at Yale University under Frederick A. Pottle, and his book was a Yale Studies in English volume. The year after its publication Harold Bloom arrived at Yale as a graduate student (also with Pottle as his adviser), which in hindsight is symbolic of a new era. A nascent ‘Romantic revival’ was already underway, and the English department at Yale would become its most important locus, including in the work of the so-called ‘Yale school of deconstruction’.35

Bloom’s PhD and first book were on Shelley, but by the late 1950s and early 60s his focus had widened to include Romanticism as a whole and Wordsworth’s place in it. This period gave rise to much new scholarship, the tenor of which is captured in the title of a 1963 volume edited by Northrop Frye: Romanticism Reconsidered. The work of Geoffrey Hartman, for example – like Bloom, Hartman would be a sort of ‘associate member’ of the Yale school – typifies the nature of the reconsideration. His essay ‘Romanticism and “Anti-Self-Consciousness”’ (1962) argues that ‘Like many Romantics, Wordsworth had passed through a depression clearly linked to the ravage of self-consciousness’. Such experiences ‘raise the issue of whether there exist what might be called remedia intellectus: remedies against the corrosive power of analysis and the fixated self-consciousness.’ Therefore, ‘Self-consciousness becomes the subject of poems which qua poetry seek to transmute it.’36 This is Romanticism as ‘internalisation’, an idea that occupied several scholars of this period. Frye, for example, in his contribution to Romanticism Reconsidered, states that ‘Romanticism proper’ involves ‘the internalizing of reality’.37 Bloom’s contribution is central, but apprehending it involves something of a breadcrumb trail.

Perhaps thinking of posterity and his role in the revival-cum-reconsideration, Bloom made following the trail easier than it might have been by carefully recording when he wrote his various contributions. The most important single piece of writing, and the one to which my title alludes, is ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, an essay written in 1968, first published in the Yale Review in 1969, and expanded for Romanticism and Consciousness (1970), a collection edited by Bloom, which also contains essays by Hartman and Frye. Looking back at the essay in 2004, Bloom wrote that ‘after a third of a century, I find it best represents my lifetime thought on the Romantic poets.’38

To internalise is ‘to give an inward or subjective character to; to experience or understand from a mental or spiritual perspective’ (OED). Bloom argues that Romanticism as such can be understood as the internalisation of the hero quest – he even uses ‘Romantic’ and ‘internalized’ as synonyms39 – and the essay begins with Freud, who, Bloom argues, thought that ‘The deepest satisfactions of literature […] come from a release of tensions in the psyche.’ Moreover,

what Blake and Wordsworth do for their readers, or can do, is closely related to what Freud does or can do for his, which is to provide both a map of the mind and a profound faith that the map can be put to a saving use.40

However, Bloom thinks Freud found only ‘part of the truth’ because the ‘internalization of romance, particularly of the quest variety […] [was] made for more than therapeutic purposes’.41

As well as being a student of myth-making, Bloom is a critic with his own mythopoeic tendencies, so it is helpful to range back and forth through the essay in order to extract what is schematic as regards the nature of this quest. He identifies the first stage with Prometheus (bound) and the second, taking a phrase from one of Blake’s letters, with ‘the Real Man, the Imagination’:

Prometheus is the poet-as-hero in the first stage of his quest, marked by a deep involvement in political, social, and literary revolution […] The Real Man, the Imagination, emerges after terrible crises in the major stage of the Romantic quest, which is typified by a relative disengagement from revolutionary activism […] so as to bring the search within the self and its ambiguities. […] The final enemy to overcome is a recalcitrance in the self[.]42

Bloom’s (acknowledged) debt to Hartman is evident in his elucidation of this recalcitrance:

The high cost of Romantic internalization, that is, of finding paradises within a renovated man, tends to manifest itself in the arena of self-consciousness. The quest is to widen consciousness as well as to intensify it, but the quest is shadowed by a spirit that tends to narrow consciousness to an acute preoccupation with the self. This shadow of imagination is solipsism, what Shelley calls the Spirit of Solitude or Alastor[.]43

This spirit – ‘The final enemy to overcome’ – can also be thought of as what Shelley calls

the unwilling dross that checks the spirit’s flight, Wordsworth the sad perplexity or fear that kills or […] the hope that is unwilling to be fed, and Keats, most simply and perhaps most powerfully, the Identity. […] The best single name for the antagonist is Keats’s Identity, but the most traditional is Selfhood, and so I shall use it here.44

Bloom’s template for the internalised quest moves by systole and diastole, outflowing followed by self-filling: social activism, then crisis and disengagement; self-analysis, then a fight against solipsism. Wordsworth instigated this pulsation along with its inherent problematics:

Wordsworth is a crisis-poet […] [he] came […] to heal the division within man, and between man and the world, if never quite between man and man. […] [He] made his kind of poetry out of an extreme urgency, and out of an overfilled inner self […] that nearly choked in an excess of its own delights. This is the Egotistical Sublime of which Keats complained, but Keats knew his debt to Wordsworth[.]45

The idea that Wordsworth tried without quite succeeding to heal the division between man and man has been noted by several critics. David Perkins, for example, says that Wordsworth loved ‘Nature […] as a reality, man as an idea’.46 This distinction forms part of the analysis of Kenneth Johnston, another Wordsworthian trained at Yale:

The ‘Prospectus’ [to The Excursion] begins, ‘On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life’ […] [The phrase] establishes a balance between individual integrity (Man) and social responsibility (Human Life) in the world-as-given (Nature), that constitutes at once the glory and the stumbling block of Wordsworth’s democratic imagination. […] [He] constantly tried, and constantly failed, to integrate a vision of imaginatively redeemed society into The Recluse’s epic mission. […] Almost from the beginning, it has been the criticism of Wordsworth’s egotism and his ‘nature worship’ that they lead him, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, to turn his eyes ‘from half of human fate’. But the manuscripts of his master-project, largely unpublished until recent times, show that he was determined to turn his vision toward ‘the tribes and fellowships of men’, to give them ‘authentic comment’.47

A word on one more Yale Romanticist to whom we will return in the conclusion. The Yale Studies in English series was revived in 2008 with Paul H. Fry’s Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are, a study, in a sense, of what Johnston calls Wordsworth’s democratic imagination, whose thesis is one explanation of why Wordsworth could not fully integrate ‘social responsibility’ into his work. Fry explains that his ‘approach for the most part avoids issues related to history and politics’. This is because,

Equality for Wordsworth (oneness, unity) was never a political idea. Fostered amid rocks and stones and trees, he saw equality in this largely mineral world as the ontic unity of all things, including human things. This was his central and most radical insight[.]48

Fry’s title is an allusion to the ‘Prospectus’ to The Excursion, in which Wordsworth promises to use ‘words / Which speak of nothing more than what we are’ (58–59). ‘Wordsworth discovers the revelation of being itself’, says Fry, ‘in the nonhumanity that “we” share with the nonhuman universe’. ‘Wordsworth is a great leveler’, but ‘Ontologically […] not politically’. On this reading, there was no ‘apostasy’ because ‘Wordsworth was never radically politicized’ in the first place.49 Rather, his levelling, democratic instinct for existential equality found merely a passing means of political expression in the French Revolution, when, as he later said, he ‘went over to Paris’ and ‘was pretty hot in it’.50

Wordsworth’s leveling instinct […] does not arise initially as a philosophy of human society (republican politics) but as a philosophy of nature which in its turn implies, or at first blush in any case implied, a republican politics.51

Fry absolves Wordsworth of apostasy by pointing to a consistency in his ‘leveling instinct’, though of course Wordsworth was aware of others’ disappointment in him for his giving up on republican politics, hence, as Johnston says, he ‘constantly tried’ – ‘was determined to’ – remember ‘society’. Fry believes Wordsworth found a partially successful compromise as early as ‘Tintern Abbey’, and summarises what he believes was Wordsworth’s motivation for writing: ‘I want to write a poem about my hopes for humanity and for myself. These two things no longer seem to me identical, as they once did, yet they are still connected somehow.’52 We might call this Tinternalisation.

All of which is to say that, as this thesis will argue, Shelley and Keats did not have problems with Wordsworth because he straightforwardly rejoiced in the names of solipsism and egotism. They were somewhat Wordsworth-sceptical, but if Bloom and Johnston are right then Wordsworth’s quest contained from the start the elements that have always characterised responses to it. He continuously calibrates himself to his dual context within nature and society, seeking to reconcile individual integrity and social responsibility. The title of Book VIII of The Prelude contains the claim that ‘Love of Nature [leads] to love of Mankind’. It is perhaps of this that the Wordsworth sceptic is most sceptical, but the fuller, implied claim is that the love of nature aids the repair of individual integrity and thereby permits the love of mankind. Morris Dickstein is an example of a critic who is unsceptical about this. He argues that Wordsworth’s poem ‘Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree’, which I address in Chapter 1 (p. 54), ‘introduces the counterpoint to solitude that would occupy him all his life: the sympathetic imagination that arises paradoxically from the solitary experience of nature’; and his poetry in general ‘conveys the drama of the solitary man who was able to integrate his feeling for himself with his feeling for others, to move on, as he always insisted, from love of nature to love of man’ (my emphasis).53

This thesis aims to demonstrate that if Wordsworth ‘constantly tried’ to put ‘feeling for others’ and ‘redeemed society’ into his work, and if this was Shelley’s and Keats’s chosen emphasis too, then they were continuing a poetic project, not overturning one. Bloom partially anticipates this: ‘The fullest development of the Romantic quest, after [Blake and Wordsworth] […] is in Keats’s Endymion and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound’; and in The Fall of Hyperion there are ‘hints of what the Imagination’s triumph would have been in Keats.’54 Bloom also refers to the ‘purest version’ of ‘internalized romance’ as comprising ‘the poems of symbolic voyaging that move in a continuous tradition from Shelley’s Alastor to Yeats’s The Wanderings of Oisin’,55 which is a reminder of the poem whose conspicuous absence from Bloom’s essay I have not yet addressed, namely The Excursion. It is clear that the Solitary is a sometime Prometheus stuck in the ‘terrible crises [of] the major stage of the Romantic quest’, and yet he is not referred to once. That is, Bloom, a towering figure in the study of literary influence, in ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, the essay that ‘best represents [his] lifetime thought on the Romantic poets’, omitted to mention the main influence on the poetry of internal quests.56

Discovering the Solitary’s proper place in Bloom’s thinking – as a prelude to developing and refining his emphases – requires going back a decade to his major book on the Romantic poets, The Visionary Company, written 1959–60, published in 1961, and dedicated to M. H. Abrams, quoted above, who taught Bloom when Bloom was an undergraduate at Cornell.57 The book contains chapters devoted to each of the six major Romantics, and near the beginning of those on Byron, Shelley, and Keats, Bloom makes a series of categorical statements about the influence of The Excursion:

The quest-theme of romance previously internalized by Blake and Wordsworth appears again in Shelley’s Alastor and Keats’s Endymion under Wordsworth’s influence. Canto III of Childe Harold manifests a more superficial Wordsworthian influence, probably owing both to Byron’s relationship with Shelley in 1816 and to his own reading of The Excursion. The theme of a quest away from alienation and toward an unknown good is recurrent in the Romantics[.]

Alastor is prompted by The Excursion […] It seemed to the young Shelley that Wordsworth and Coleridge had inaugurated a mode, liberated an imaginative impulse, but then had repudiated their own creation.

The influence of Wordsworth’s Excursion is basic in Alastor, as we have seen. The determining influences on the internalized theme of Endymion are the combined ones of Alastor and the Excursion, as both emphasize the destructiveness of an inward-turning and stagnant solitude.58

I quote the chapter on Byron because the statement that the Romantics quested for an ‘unknown’ good is an important point where I depart from Bloom, as set out below, but Byron is not a focus of the thesis, because of what Bloom calls the ‘more superficial Wordsworthian influence’ in his work. The quest to correct despondency presupposes an earnestness in believing that poetry, in the words of Abrams quoted above, ‘contributes toward [the] aim’ of ‘an abundant life in this world’.59 As Tilottama Rajan points out, Childe Harold ‘renounces the sentimental illusions of quest-romance’ as much as (superficially) internalising them.60 Byron will, however, feature briefly in Chapter 3 of this thesis because the renewal of his relationship with Shelley, in 1818, inspired Shelley’s ‘Julian and Maddalo’ in which Julian ‘Argue[s] against despondency’ (48).

Johnston and Ruoff note, no doubt partly with Bloom in mind, that ‘1960 could provide a convenient starting date from which to document Wordsworth’s steady rise to academic preeminence.’61 But it is a mystery to me how the writer of the above statements went on to publish an essay called ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’ in which he does not refer to The Excursion except to call it ‘an aesthetic disaster’! It is possible that Bloom re-read The Excursion shortly after writing the ‘Internalization’ essay, because poem and theory only properly come together in his book Yeats, published in 1970. Here Bloom makes further statements, like the one above, about the continuous tradition of poems of symbolic voyaging, but there is now an ur-quest: ‘It is from the figure of the Solitary in The Excursion that the heroes of Alastor, Endymion, and Childe Harold III derive, and from these questers and their followers […] that Yeats takes his Oisin.’

I return to Yeats in Chapter 2 (p. 116) and my analysis of Book IV of The Excursion, but for now the trail of Bloomian breadcrumbs leads to one more essay. The internalisation theory having always been implicit in The Visionary Company, in the revised edition of that book (1971), Bloom returned and, in a new epilogue, inserted the most explicit statement of the theory to date:

[T]he Wordsworth who dominated nineteenth-century poetry from his own time onward was the author of The Excursion […] This Wordsworth, though he overtly preaches against the Solitary’s errors, nevertheless fathered the poetry of his century th[r]ough the figure of the Solitary. The line from the Solitary of The Excursion to the Shelley of Alastor, the Byron of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the Keats of Endymion is quite clear […] this tradition of the Wordsworthian Solitary and his quest[.]62

My account of Bloom, and indeed Bloom himself, might leave us wondering, ‘The Wordsworthian Solitary and his quest for what?’ In the final paragraph of the ‘Internalization’ essay Bloom states that ‘Whatever else the love that the full Romantic quest aims at may be, it cannot be a therapy.’ Yet this is after having said, in the first paragraph, that Wordsworth provides ‘a map of the mind and a profound faith that the map can be put to a saving use.’63 I return to this below, in the final section of this introduction (p. 31).

New Historicism: New Politicism?

The Romantic revival was in part a response to the perceived undervaluing of Romantic poetry by T. S. Eliot and the New Critics; an ‘upward revaluation [...] in the wake of […] hostilities’.64 They had created what Bloom called ‘The myth of a Metaphysical counter-tradition’, which in the 1960s and 70s he trenchantly advocated overturning in favour of the ‘central’ line, ‘Protestant, radical, and Miltonic-Romantic’.65 He was, as it were, the Prometheus to Eliot’s Jupiter, the purveyor of a personal theory of poetry and criticism, and a cheerful committer of fallacies intentional and affective. Like Wordsworth, however, having begun as a radical, Bloom is remembered more as the conservative he became, because by the late 1970s he was no longer Prometheus to the New Critics, but Jupiter to the New Historicists, to whom David Simpson provides a helpful introduction.66

Looking back […] we may be struck by how much of the discussion of Romanticism and history in the 1980s was carried on by way of a debate about Wordsworth. […] Much of this work carried on the case made by [Jerome] McGann [in The Romantic Ideology (1983)], producing (in [Marjorie] Levinson’s words) ‘demystifications of Romanticist readings as well as of Romantic poems’ […] it was also a longer-view response to Geoffrey Hartman’s Wordsworth’s Poetry, first published in 1964 and principally responsible for the rehabilitation of Wordsworth as a complex literary-theoretical figure[.]67

It is the view of this thesis that the likes of Hartman, and the criticism of the Romantic revival more broadly, are worth revisiting on merit.

McGann’s book is the exemplary New Historicist treatment of Romanticism. He ‘proposes a new, critical view of Romanticism and its literary products’ – these soon become ‘ideological products’ – and he is nothing if not critical.68 Romantic ‘ideology’ was to be demystified, and ‘Wordsworth [was] the chief poetic offender’, explains Simpson, because he wrote ‘poetry that “annihilates” history […] and allows the poet (as Shelley and Browning, too, had suggested) to lose the world in order to gain his own “immortal soul”’.69 As McGann says of the ‘Intimations’ ode, Wordsworth’s poetry enacts ‘the displacement of the problem inwardly’.70 This sounds rather like ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, and indeed in his earlier essay, ‘Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism’, McGann refers to Romanticism’s ‘patterns of “internalization,” as they have been so memorably called’ (though not memorably enough for Bloom to be referenced).71 McGann seems not so much to dispute the theory, but to take exception to Wordsworth and his inward turn. The difference, however, is that whereas Bloom saw the second generation taking up the internalised quest, in McGann they are at odds with the older poet. As Emma Mason puts it, McGann finds Wordsworth ‘politically lacking’, and Shelley is therefore favoured for having perceived the same thing.72 In fact, James Chandler believes that this tradition of Wordsworth as the politically lacking apostate was inaugurated by Shelley himself.73

The question of internalisation or inward displacement might be taken to apply not just to poetry but to criticism and its motivations. Introducing a volume of New Historicist essays, Jeffrey Cox and Larry Reynolds sketch the origins of the approach:

[The] history of the Left has been written from the Left—the 1960s taught us that criticism had to be committed and thus gave rise to a politically, historically aware scholarship—and from the Right—the Left, which lost politically at the end of the 1960s […] retreated to the academy where it could continue its battles by other subversive means.

This second account paints New Historicism itself as the internalisation of left-romance. Political ‘awareness’ – awareness in general – is a good, but not if binary categories such as ‘improvement of social conditions’ and ‘reactionary purposes’ produce foregone conclusions in criticism; or the attempt to comprehend everything that a poem is, open to the benefit which doing so might confer, is reduced to ‘cooptation’.74 The hermeneutic is as suspicious as the Solitary’s. To suspend disbelief willingly is not to be hoodwinked, but to choose the pleasurable co-optation of reading. Moreover, the idea of ‘displacement’ risks introducing a sort of ducking-stool logic, whereby a poem is political because it is, or – as in the case of ‘Tintern Abbey’ or ‘To Autumn’ – because it is not.75 To paraphrase Wilde’s preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, one might say that the New Historicist dislike of Romantic ‘ideology’ is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass; the New Historicist dislike of Romantic ‘displacement’ is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.76

However, the age of New Historicism may be defined as extending to the present moment, and it has not proved materialist or determinist enough to have produced a monolithic account of Wordsworth. It is as capable of bringing him and Shelley together as of forcing them apart, as in an essay in the Cox–Reynolds volume by Terence Hoagwood: ‘Wordsworth and Shelley […] both argue that there is a connection between mental structures and social institutions’; and ‘Shelley’s prose extends relentlessly the imaginative arguments of Wordsworth’s youth’.77 Hoagwood too assimilates the theory of internalisation, but presents it in an entirely different light:

Wordsworth’s poetry characteristically displaces his ideological frame; his poetry transcodes political issues to conceptual levels where minds are enslaved or liberated. […] transposition to a manifest level of ideological preoccupation—that is, treatment of the structures of thought—need not be interpreted as a reactionary retreat into Wordsworth’s private head. Rather than the turncoat politics of toryism, which Shelley and Byron certainly thought it was, this rhetorical transposition may represent a submergence of the discourse of freedom, aimed precisely at preserving and empowering that discourse, rather than effacing it. […] A Romanticism which is a conservative retreat into the privacy of one’s own subjectivity has for too long been permitted to constitute our notion of all British Romanticism. These values and tendencies are not all of Romanticism; they are not even all of Wordsworth, as his own life and work demonstrate amply.78

To return to McGann for a moment, he says that ‘The cave to which Prometheus and Asia retire at the end of Act III [of Prometheus Unbound] is […] a place from which the renovated future will one day spring’.79 Retirement followed by a renovated future could stand for the intention of Wordsworth’s entire ‘Recluse’ project. To take at face value Shelley’s and Byron’s defining themselves as Young Turks against Wordsworth the lost leader and his ‘turncoat politics’ is to be uncritical of their self-presentation.

Another critic whose work is of interest on this front is Cox himself, who in the less partisan atmosphere of the late 1990s published Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Shelley, Keats, Hunt, and their Circle, which argues on a Goldilocks principle that groups and networks of writers are a good level of historical analysis, neither a narrow look at solitary genius, nor too sweeping. Like McGann, Cox contrasts Wordsworth with the second generation, frequently on account of the latter’s ‘doctrine of sociability’.80 For Keats, ‘The function of poetry is not to offer private insight or consolation but to transform a culture of despondency into one devoted to the hopes of a world reformed.’81 This does not seem to allow that private insight might necessarily precede hopes of a world reformed, a renovated future, and at least one reviewer found ‘The ideological divide Cox perceives as separating the first- and second-generation Romantics […] [to be] only one example of his fondness for reductive dichotomies.’82 Strangely, Cox even credits the idea that Wordsworth’s ‘egotistical sublime’ promotes despondency (the ‘remedy’ being more ‘sociability’).83 Nonetheless, the book is of great interest – Chapter 3, especially – as an historicist’s account of Keats’s influences. Cox agrees with Bloom insofar as ‘the [Hunt] group’s engagement with the Excursion […] [led] them to a collective effort to rewrite what was the central poem in their Wordsworth canon’, a poem Cox admits ‘propounds a social vision’.84 He returned to these matters in William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic (2021), which reconfirms that ‘the entire [Hunt] circle took up Wordsworth’s central theme of “despondency”’, and strikes a somewhat more reconciling note than the earlier book, stating that ‘there is a surprising degree of similarity between the terms used to abuse the Lakers and those later used against the Cockneys’, and that ‘While the Cockneys become the Lakers’ other, they might have been their brethren.’85 ‘Cockney’ was coined in the Tory Blackwood’s Magazine and ‘Laker’ in the Whiggish Edinburgh Review. With hindsight we can see that the two schools were doing something new in poetry (what we now call Romanticism) and being attacked for it by conservatives of Tory and Whig factions.

This thesis is more concerned with what in the poetry tells us that they might have been their brethren, than with what in cultural and critical history tells us that they were not. Far from historicising the internal quest to correct despondency, it seeks to show that the concepts involved speak to the concerns of today. Moreover, if New Historicism is sceptical of self-creation, I am interested in that poetic self-creation that does occur in the gap between a non-naive historical awareness and the overdeterminism of some New Historicism. Just as the Cornell Wordsworth is a gift from textual criticism, perhaps the most valuable products of New Historicism, for those who did not live through its heyday, are superbly well-founded biographies such as Nicholas Roe’s John Keats (2012).86

Wordsworth wrote ‘for the sake / Of youthful Poets, who among these Hills / Will be my second self when I am gone’ (‘Michael’, 37–39); Shelley believed in ‘that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world’;87 and Keats, comparing ‘human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments’ and ‘dark passages’, thought that Wordsworth’s ‘Genius is explorative of those dark Passages’:

Now if we live, and go on thinking, we too shall explore them. he is a genius and superior [to] us, in so far as he can, more than we, make discoveries, and shed a light in them—Here I must think Wordsworth is deeper than Milton […] [who] did not think into the human heart, as Wordsworth has done[.]88

The youthful poets Shelley and Keats were Wordsworth’s second selves, their thoughts co-operated with his (without being co-opted), and they followed him down dark passages into the human heart. That Wordsworth stubbornly went on living, sometimes behaved unlovably, and became the distributor of stamps for Westmorland does not matter very much.89 It does not even matter very much that a few weeks after writing the ‘Mansion of Many Apartments’ letter, Keats found Wordsworth’s ‘canvassing for the Lowthers’ ‘Sad—sad—sad’ – the second letter does not cancel the first.90 I outline my preferred critical approach in the final section of this introduction.

Turn of the century and the Cornell edition

Still in 1987 Simpson could write ‘The Excursion has been very little studied’; and for William Galperin, two years later, ‘it has become the “tradition” of Wordsworth criticism to enlist the poem as a warning sign of Wordsworth’s decline’.91 But you wait half a century for another monograph on The Excursion to turn up and then two come along in the space of five years: Impure Conceits: Rhetoric and Ideology in Wordsworth’s Excursion (1997) by Alison Hickey and Re-reading The Excursion: Narrative, Response and the Wordsworthian Dramatic Voice (2002) by Sally Bushell. Hickey ‘focuses on The Excursion’s “impure conceits” (2.485), whose gaps and strayings […] are thematized in the poem’s plots of deviation and deferral, usurpation, broken lineages, and unfulfilled promises.’92 The ‘impurity’ of The Excursion is perhaps inversely proportional to the philosophical systematicity Coleridge hoped it would have. Hickey is not concerned, in the New Historicist mode, ‘to make the earlier Wordsworth answerable to the later “conservative” Wordsworth’, in part because this fails to recognise that ‘For [him], the relation of poetry to system (ideology) is an ongoing, irresolvable question’.93 This relates to the issue of whether the ‘voices’ of The Excursion are sufficiently differentiated, which I explore in Chapter 2. Hickey argues, rightly in my view, that

Often the poem’s defects have been ascribed to the presumed fact that Wordsworth’s mind is already made up: the Wanderer is his spokesman, the Solitary his straw man, and the dialogue just a way for him to teach his own philosophy while pretending to be “dialogic.” But […] The Excursion’s characters are not reducible to fixed positions; they are all double in some way.94

The genuinely dialogic nature of the poem is easy to overlook because the reductive idea of Wordsworth’s life of two halves – ‘the “good” early and presumably radical Wordsworth [and] the “bad” increasingly conservative Wordsworth’, as Cox puts it – has always been seductive.95 As Cox’s summary demonstrates, the division bundles politics and poetry: ‘good’ radicalism and high-quality poetry; ‘bad’ conservatism (apostasy) and less good poetry. But of course it is not as simple as that. If Fry is right about ‘Tintern Abbey’, then by the time of its composition Wordsworth had already taken the ‘conservative’ step of distinguishing between his hopes for humanity and his hopes for himself. (Could he have emerged from his depression without doing so?) Fry states that ‘Conventional views on the date of Wordsworth’s apostasy range from 1797 or 1798 to 1806’.96 The early end of this range would reverse the formula rehearsed above, and instead find that the ‘golden decade’ of Wordsworth’s poetry, 1797/8–1807/8, began with his political apostasy.

Tempting as this might be as a foray into the politicisation of Wordsworth, it is not my argument. Rather, returning to Hickey and the dialogic nature of The Excursion, with its double-natured characters, the poem problematises the whole notion of a divide between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Wordsworth, partly because it was written over such a long period. In the title of Chapter 1 I refer to the period 1797–1813, from Wordsworth’s beginning ‘The Ruined Cottage’ to his finishing The Excursion. A text produced over sixteen years that straddle the dating of politics and poetry good and bad can hardly be a ‘warning sign’ of one signified thing, be it decline or anything else. Rather, in its capacious impurity, The Excursion contains all these, and as such – hence my focus on it – is the poetic embodiment of Wordsworth’s career.97 A career whose direction a figure such as Shelley was bound to react against, in the midst of the Regency, the Napoleonic Wars, and his own ongoing crises, but which criticism ought perhaps to make more effort to view in the round. As Hickey says in the doctoral thesis that gave rise to her book,

One of the reasons that it is so difficult for us to stand back from [the] model of decline or betrayal is that we still read The Excursion as filtered through the points of view of the second generation of Romantic poets. [...] It is ironic that the neglect the poem suffers is largely due to those upon whom it exercised the most pervasive influence.98

Following Bloom, and making what I suppose is a pragmatist’s case, I think the ‘pervasive influence’ of The Excursion on what ended up, after deep thought, in Shelley’s and Keats’s poems is of far greater interest than ‘points of view’ expressed in letters or conversation. For this and other reasons it is as true now as when Hickey wrote it that The Excursion is ‘a vast, unexplored space that has yet to be granted its full complexity.’99

The dialogic nature of The Excursion is explored at book length in Sally Bushell’s Re-reading The Excursion: Narrative, Response and the Wordsworthian Dramatic Voice (2002). She relates her work to Hickey’s by saying,

Like her, I view the text as an open-ended, explorative work which questions its own presentation of poetic narrative. However, Hickey is centrally concerned with how ‘poetry intersects with its social and political contexts’ (8) in the poem at a figural level. […] [She] is interested in the failures and limitations of rhetoric – ‘the accidents and errancies of figuration’ (14) – which she sees the poem as exploring. The dialogue between characters is viewed as a ‘web of ambivalently inflected rhetorical perspectives’ (14). In other words, Hickey reads the dramatic structure of the poem – the use of characters, exchange of speech, and telling of stories – as a kind of complex rhetorical device. […] Like Hickey I am opposed to a traditional reading of the poem as ‘monolithic, monologic bombast’ (12) but my opposition to this is expressed in a way almost diametrically opposed to hers. Thus, where she suggests that the text is not to be read dramatically […] I argue for a treatment of the work on the basis of what it actually presents: as a dramatic poem consisting of speakers and listeners. […] There is room for both Hickey’s ‘figurative’ and my ‘conversational’ approach[.]100

Bushell goes on to argue that the poem has been read as a didactic (propositional) work and judged harshly as a consequence (not by Hickey, but in general). Rather, it is a dramatic work peopled by fallible characters whose ‘messages’ need to be inferred with care. To give a straightforward but important example, ‘the reader is encouraged both to sympathise with, and be distanced from, the Solitary at different points’.101 The book ends with Bushell’s stating that ‘The Excursion is to be “re-read” […] as a poem of value in its own right, developing a complex poetics which has at its centre not just the speaking poet but also the attentive reader.’102 I certainly agree with this, but, as is the case when reading Hickey, I think that there is more to say about what the therapeutic poetics of ‘Despondency Corrected’ are intended to do for both speaking poet and attentive reader.

By the time Bushell’s book was published, she was one of the editors working on the Cornell edition of The Excursion, which came out in 2007. I admit to experiencing a literary-critical frisson when I read in her 1999 doctoral thesis, the basis of the book, a reference to ‘the forthcoming Cornell Edition of The Excursion’, of which, unbeknown to her at the time, she would be an editor.103 As Bushell and her fellow editors say in their preface, ‘This volume is the final edition in the Cornell Wordsworth series, a project that began four decades ago.’104 Perhaps surprisingly, it is the first scholarly edition of The Excursion to take as its reading text the 1814 quarto read by Shelley and Keats. For this reason, and because it post-dates all the secondary material I have referred to so far, it is the indispensible edition of the poem.

To return to where I began this section, Hickey in 2010 could look back and say that ‘in recent decades The Excursion has garnered an increased share of scholarly attention, culminating in the magnificent new Cornell edition of the poem.’105 Tentatively, then, by the two hundredth anniversary of the poem’s publication, a modest renaissance in interest was underway, but not one which has yet taken account of its place at the centre of Bloom’s internalisation theory.

The Excursion’s bicentenary to the present

In 2014, The Excursion’s bicentenary, the Wordsworth Circle published an issue devoted to the poem, which allows us to take the temperature of The Excursion and the ‘increased share of scholarly attention’ it is receiving in the early twenty-first century.106 In the first article, Bushell explores the revising and revisioning that took Wordsworth from the original ‘Ruined Cottage’ (1797) to Book I of The Excursion over a decade and a half later – ‘the spatial and temporal dimensions of the return to self’ – and, building on the subject of her book, finds the Wanderer himself ‘a professional re-reader of person and place’. Moreover,

the Wanderer actively and explicitly applies the act of reading into/ reading onto the Solitary himself and his mental outlook in the hopes of effecting change [my emphasis] […] This is more successful than might first appear since, for all his verbal scepticism, misanthropy, and resistance, the entire poem concludes with a re-articulation of the wanderer chronotope [setting, ‘time-place’] in a way that encompasses the Solitary[.]107

In his excellent ‘Ebb and Flow in The Excursion’, Michael O’Neill notes that ‘Hickey (1997) and Bushell (2002), among others, have recognized in the poem a tale that is far from the unreadable monolith of critical tradition.’ I return to this article in Chapter 2 (p. 93), and only note here O’Neill’s judgement that The Excursion is

in many ways the quintessential Romantic long poem, as in their different ways, Shelley and Keats were quick to see. […] Keats responds to the ability of the poem to convey the ebb and flow of feelings as amongst its chief distinctions. […] echoes in Prometheus Unbound suggest that Shelley responded with a similar artistic appreciativeness, whatever his overt polemical views of the poem.108

Johnston too draws on Hickey and Bushell in considering a question to which I return in Chapter 2 (p. 125), namely whether Wordsworth was ‘of the Solitary’s party’. Johnston concludes that he ‘did not develop what one might call the ideologically pure form of the Solitary’s story’, but nevertheless ‘reading the Solitary’s state of mind as being close to Wordsworth’s is not a misreading but a key insight.’109 Galperin refers to the poem’s ‘palliative’ qualities, an idea to which I will return in a moment.110

The introduction to the issue is founding editor Marilyn Gaull’s cheerful and unaffected ‘Greetings’. In telling the story of her first encounter with The Excursion, ‘by accident in a library sale’, and in paying tribute to it, Gaull presents a poem that is as one would want to be on an excursion – not overburdened with baggage:

[T]he messages were empowering: how minds, even mine, were creative, adapted to a “bright and breathing world,” as the Solitary called it, where “origins” did not matter, and the words, “nothing more than what we are,” were enough, the energies, pace, turns of phrase, insights, surprise, and joy everywhere. […] I saw […] the Solitary […] separate but not solitary, and in many ways like us, a student, hardly dejected, genial, gleeful, blithe, as Wordsworth called him[.]111

Gaull lists the approaches covered in the issue as ‘textual […] technical […] analytical and interpretive […] ancient sources […] contemporary contexts […] religious background […] Victorian influence […] and the material book’.112 Of those listed, the approaches I hope to emulate in this thesis are the broad one of ‘analytical and interpretive’, where Gaull places O’Neill, Johnston and Galperin, and ‘contemporary contexts’, which describes two consecutive essays on other major Romantics’ relationships with The Excursion: Jane Stabler’s ‘Byron and The Excursion’ and Seamus Perry’s ‘Coleridge’s Disappointment in The Excursion’. A potentially fruitful approach not present is ‘psychological’. Also missing, of course, are the younger Romantics, and I hope that Chapters 3 and 4 of this thesis serve, in effect, as ‘Shelley and The Excursion’ and ‘Keats and The Excursion’, the former’s disappointment notwithstanding.

What Galperin says of the palliation offered by The Excursion relates to the end of Book I; that is, to the tale of Margaret, which was, in its earliest version, the stand-alone poem called ‘The Ruined Cottage’. I return to the passage in Chapter 1 (p. 53), but in brief the Wanderer, at the end of his story of terrible suffering, gestures and explains to the Poet that ‘the high spear-grass on that wall, / By mist and silent rain-drops silver’d o’er’ conveys to his heart ‘an image of tranquillity’ and, ultimately, ‘happiness’ (I. 973–76, 984). As Galperin says, ‘the spear-grass is explicitly a palliative’.113 Gaull hopes that the issue ‘will inspire more essays fulfilling the possibilities these have initiated’, and it is my contention that if The Excursion is to repay its modestly ‘increased share of scholarly attention’ – more, if it deserves the attention of the reading public that buys paperback classics – this fulfilment might arise from what Galperin points to, the palliative possibilities of the poem.114

It is the intention of this thesis to offer a more psychological approach to The Excursion than those represented in the Wordsworth Circle special edition, and then to apply this to the poem’s influence on Shelley and Keats. The approach arises out of Bloom’s internal quest model, but seeks to demystify phrases such as ‘a recalcitrance in the self’, by drawing out the model’s latent therapeutic implications.115

Despondency palliated, a new approach to Bloom’s internal quest

A recent work of interest is The Poetics of Palliation: Romantic Literary Therapy, 1790–1850 (2019) by Brittany Pladek, which explores some areas already mentioned, though in the case of Wordsworth Pladek focuses on Lyrical Ballads and does not mention The Excursion. She identifies ‘a resurgent interest in the literary community in recuperative forms of reading […] as well as a wider cultural interest in what is called “self-care”.’ Weighing the political implications of this, she in effect defends Wordsworth, stating that ‘even within the liberal-individualist paradigm, [his] model of poetic palliation seeks to close the gap between social consciousness and private therapy’, which again recapitulates Johnston’s idea of a balance sought ‘between individual integrity (Man) and social responsibility (Human Life)’.116

As I set out below, this thesis attempts to take the poetics of palliation to, even draw them out from, Bloom’s work on internal quests, and thereafter, as it were, take the neo-Bloomian package back to Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats. In recent Wordsworth criticism, words such as ‘internalise’ and ‘internalisation’ occur more frequently than do actual references to Bloom’s essay. This might suggest that the theory itself has been internalised in the sense of assimilated, and I have already mentioned McGann’s pointed non-reference to Bloom when discussing Romanticism’s ‘patterns of “internalization,” as they have been so memorably called’.117 In the specific case of Excursion criticism – none of the seventeen pieces in the Wordsworth Circle bicentenary edition refer to ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’ – part of the explanation might be that in the well-known essay of that name Bloom does not actually mention the poem he shortly afterwards put at the centre of his theory. I have tried to bring essay and poem together in my section on Bloom above. But when one looks into this, non-reference can begin to seem intentional. Remarkably, though Bushell’s doctoral thesis contains twenty-five uses of ‘internalise’, ‘internalisation’, etc., including one with Bloom’s American -ize spelling, neither the thesis, the book that followed, nor the Cornell edition of The Excursion, contains a single reference to Harold Bloom.118

For many critics of the last half century, if they think of Bloom at all, they think of the ‘Anxiety of Influence’ – discussed below – or (worse) the ‘School of Resentment’,119 not of the ingenious Romanticist who argued that Wordsworth ‘fathered the poetry of his century th[r]ough the figure of the Solitary.’ If there is a renaissance of interest in The Excursion, it seems unwilling to notice that ‘by far the most recognized literary critic of his day’ (according to a tribute from Bloom’s faculty at Yale120) stated in his major work on the Romantics that through ‘the Wordsworthian Solitary and his quest’, ‘Wordsworth was the inventor of modern poetry’.121

We must return, though, to the question: the Wordsworthian Solitary and his quest for what? I have quoted Bloom on Romanticism’s ‘quest away from alienation and toward an unknown good’, and it isn’t that he never attempts to define this unknown good.122 For example, in the ‘Internalization’ essay:

The hero of internalized quest is the poet himself, the antagonists of quest are everything in the self that blocks imaginative work, and the fulfillment is never the poem itself, but the poem beyond that is made possible by the apocalypse of imagination.

And,

The internalization of quest-romance made of the poet-hero a seeker not after nature but after his own mature powers […] The widened consciousness of the poet did not give him intimations of a former union with nature or the Divine, but rather of his former selfless self.123

The ‘poem beyond […] made possible by the apocalypse of imagination’; a ‘selfless self’; ‘a capable imagination’, in a later book about Wallace Stevens:124 what do these ‘goods’ have in common? I stated above (p. 11) that Bloom thought it necessary to move beyond a Freudian understanding of the internal quest because it (the quest) was ‘made for more than therapeutic purposes’. The passage continues: it was ‘made in the name of a humanizing hope that approaches apocalyptic intensity.’125

As well as being an ingenious Romanticist, Bloom was a self-confessed Romantic, and the ‘apocalyptic intensity’ he finds in the poems is a quality shared by some of his criticism, in particular the agonistic theory set out in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), which is that what Bloom calls ‘strong poets’ – ‘the ever-living men and women, the canonical writers’ – overcome said anxiety and win eternal life by ‘strongly […] misreading previous writing’, ‘wrestling with the mighty dead’. The anxiety of influence is acutest among modern (i.e. Romantic) poets, and the internalisation of quest romance is a response to it, hence ‘All quest-romances of the post-Enlightenment, meaning all Romanticisms whatsoever, are quests to re-beget one’s own self, to become one’s own Great Original.’126 Born into an oppressively palimpsestic world, the Romantics as it were went into themselves, hoping to become kings of infinite space. As Bloom puts it in A Map of Misreading (1975) – companion piece to The Anxiety of Influence – ‘Keats is concerned […] with clearing an imaginative space for himself, in the hope of finding a map with blanks that he himself can fill in. But his one resource, like Wordsworth’s, is further internalization’.127

In some ways Bloom states his theory more plainly in A Map of Misreading: ‘Let me reduce my argument to the hopelessly simplistic; poems, I am saying, are neither about “subjects” nor about “themselves.” They are necessarily about other poems’.128 A statement like this makes sense of Bloom’s otherwise surprising associate membership of the ‘Yale school of deconstruction’. Poems, in fact, deconstruct earlier poems. And to what end? ‘[P]oetic immortality (the only eternal happiness that is relevant)’; ‘one’s election to the realm of true Instructors’. Wordsworth understood ‘that a poem is written to escape dying. Literally, poems are refusals of mortality.’ To overcome death twice, by conquering ‘ghostly fathers’ of the past and becoming canon-fit for the future – for Bloom, these are the what and the why of poetry. Writing begins to sound like ‘terror management’, and there is also an unlikely similarity to New Historicism, Bloom’s being a rather power-centred model in which strong poets resist co-optation by their precursors’ work.

Naturally, Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence has its critics. Christopher Ricks, for example, instead emphasises gratitude, arguing that the true Wordsworth, ‘my Wordsworth […] has […] the gratitude and generosity of a poet’, and that Keats, in turn, was ‘grateful to Wordsworth’:

What Keats most valued in the English poets, irrespective of anything with which they could furnish his art, was a sense of brother hood with his peers. He declines the invitation to figure in the dark melodrama of The Anxiety of Influence.129

My own ‘misreading’ of Bloom is that his category of internalised quest romance can be defined not only in terms of the past and the future, and death, but also life in the present. The quest ‘to become one’s own Great Original’ might be a case of all against all, but the quest to correct despondency is more collaborative. I argue that the poets under discussion went into themselves with a restorative agenda, hoping to improve the conditions they found, and seeking not only intimations of immortality but also intimations of mortal happiness. As Matthew Bevis puts it of Wordsworth, ‘when things were going well, the young poet couldn’t have cared less about immortality.’130 In a sense, then, the thesis seeks to demystify the Romantics as well as Bloom, and I return to this in the conclusion (p. 289) in a discussion of Bloom’s idea of poems as ‘lie[s]-against time’.131 It is true that Keats said he hoped to abide in ‘the realm of true Instructors’ – ‘I shall be among the English Poets after my death’, as he put it132 – but that is partly because circumstances compelled him to think about death. He also wanted health, not to have to worry about money, and to marry Fanny Brawne, and used poetry to process and palliate the despondency produced by these plights. ‘Oh! for a day and all well!’, as he once wrote to a friend.133

So the thesis draws less on Bloom’s maps of misreading and virgin territory, and more on the Bloom who said that Wordsworth provides his readers with ‘a map of the mind and a profound faith that the map can be put to a saving use.’134 To return to Pladek, a restorative agenda or saving use refer in this thesis to correction as palliation, not cure. Tellingly, in her book’s one reference to Bloom (excluding a footnote), Pladek says that he does not understand Wordsworth in terms of the poetics of palliation, but, contrastingly, of ‘holism’, ‘a treacherously high bar’.135 The word ‘quest’ does occur in The Excursion, but an excursion itself is not a quest for an ultimate or fixed thing, but ‘A journey […] from one’s home […] with the intention of returning […] spec. A journey […] undertaken for the sake of pleasure or health’ (OED).136 The anxiety of influence cannot be palliated, because of its apocalyptic intensity, but ordinary human suffering and ill health can be. The answer to the question ‘The Wordsworthian Solitary and his quest for what?’ is obvious. It is not a quest actually to obtain a new self or new world by means of apocalypse. It is the quest not to be despondent; to be able to return home in a state of non-despondency. And it is for this reason that, seeking to understand The Excursion and the poems it influenced, pace Bloom (though returning to the start of his great essay), in this thesis I consider the extent to which poems of internal quest are made for ‘therapeutic purposes’, and how they can produce ‘a release of tensions in the psyche’, for both writer and reader.137

The first person to do this was Wordsworth himself. Indeed, he had a notable tendency to announce in prefatory matter his interest in the mind and desire to promote its felicity. In the unpublished ‘Advertisement’ intended for Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), he writes,

The short Poems, of which these Volumes consist, were chiefly composed to refresh my mind during the progress of a work of length and labour […] [a] larger work […] They were composed with much pleasure to my own mind, & I build upon that remembrance a hope that they may afford profitable pleasure to many readers.138

The ‘work of length and labour’ was of course ‘The Recluse’, including The Excursion, a poem whose ‘main region’, as Wordsworth puts it in the ‘Prospectus’, is ‘the Mind of Man’ (40–41), and which was intended to afford correspondingly large refreshment and pleasure to said region. Moreover, the ‘Prospectus’ was written during the same period as the Lyrical Ballads ‘Preface’ in which Wordsworth announced his poetic project, in the first paragraph (unchanged between the 1800 and 1802 versions), by saying that he hopes to impart ‘that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure […] which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart.’139 He goes on to state categorically that ‘The Poet writes under one restriction only, namely, that of the necessity of giving immediate pleasure’.140 That is, of producing a higher reading on Keats’s ‘Pleasure Thermometer’.141

We tend to think of the Romantics as being opposed to utilitarianism, but ‘the necessity of giving immediate pleasure’ is a happiness principle; or, with Freud in mind, a pleasure principle. There is an irony, and perhaps an historical double take, in considering that De Quincey could almost be formulating the ‘greatest happiness principle’ the year before Bentham actually coined the term, when he says, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, ‘I confess it, as a besetting infirmity of mine, that I am too much of an Eudæmonist: I hanker too much after a state of happiness, both for myself and others’; and I do not think that Wordsworth would have minded answering, in this sense, to the name of eudaemonist, quester after ‘a life of happiness’ (Excursion, I. 550).142

There is precedent among major Wordsworth critics for considering his poetry’s therapeutic purposes, albeit often briefly. Famously, Arnold referred to ‘Wordsworth’s healing power’, and J. S. Mill found his poems ‘a medicine for my state of mind’, i.e. his ‘habitual depression’: ‘They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of.’143 Dickstein states that these ‘healing, prescriptive metaphors of Arnold and Mill are not Victorian additions, for they are already implied by Wordsworth’s own diagnosis of the modern world.’144 More recently, Jonathan Bate says Wordsworth’s ‘poetry has been for many, and can still be for some, a medium of solace and an oasis of calm in a noisy and stressful world, even a medicine for mental illness.’145 Hartman’s approach has been linked to ‘“psychoaesthetics” (the power of poetry to repair human grief)’.146 And Fry says of The Excursion, ‘The whole poem puts the question, how can we be happier?’147 How, to paraphrase the Poet, can our lives be sweet to ourselves?148

Discussing ‘The Ruined Cottage’, Duncan Wu says that ‘The real question is not so much what the poetry means as whether it works’, and that ‘Wordsworth wanted to give his reader the same experience as that attributed to the Pedlar in his visionary state.’149 If a poem ‘works’ to give readers an ‘experience’ such as tranquillity, how does it? At the end of his essay on ‘Wordsworth and Human Suffering’, Cleanth Brooks says something similar to Wu, and even more enticing: in The Excursion

the poet has enabled us to know what it “feels like” to hold the Wanderer’s faith. This he has done through his art—through what reveals itself as a most skillful and delicate management of the resources of language. The accomplishment is of the highest importance and it must not be misunderstood: the art is not cosmetic but structural—not a rhetorical presentation of plausible arguments but a poetic creation. But to try to show this in detail would involve a commentary that would far exceed the limits of this paper.150

What it feels like or, as the Pastor’s wife puts it in Book IX, ‘to see / Even as he sees’ (468–69). Making use of the less limited length permitted in a thesis, the methodology of Chapter 2 is to attempt just such a detailed commentary, before returning, in the conclusion, to the ‘skillful and delicate’ management of verse.

In the Wordsworth Circle bicentenary issue Johnston says that ‘The ideological destination of The Excursion, precisely if narrowly conceived, is to cure—“correct” is Wordsworth’s word—the Solitary’s despondency over the failed idealism of the French Revolution’.151 In the only Wordsworth Circle piece since then specifically about The Excursion, Anthony John Harding says that the poem’s agenda at the time was ‘offering troubled readers reasons for reconciling themselves to life after a protracted war.’152 My non-historicist claim is that Johnston’s statement can be contracted – the destination of The Excursion is to palliate despondency – and Harding’s works minus the last four words.

More to the point, acknowledgements of ‘therapeutic purposes’ are there in Bloom himself, in spite of apocalyptic intensity. The claim that ‘Whatever else the love that the full Romantic quest aims at may be, it cannot be a therapy’ comes in the final paragraph of the ‘Internalization’ essay, which was published for the first time in a book of Bloom’s own writing as the opening piece in The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition (1971).153 But the final paragraph of that book’s final essay, written earlier, says something quite different:

[T]he mind is the most terrible force in the world, since it alone can defend us against itself. The secret of Romanticism, from Blake and Wordsworth down to the age of Yeats and Stevens, increasingly looks like a therapy in which consciousness heals itself by a complex act of invention. The way between the mental errors of reductiveness and expansiveness is the path of invention, the finding of what will suffice through an act of discovery that is also a making. […] in a bad time […] If we listen to [the Romantic humanist and poet] he will lead us beyond the quarrels of reason and imagination, and help us to live our lives in this bare land of things as they are, alone with the wind and the weather.154

If God’s absence cannot be helped, then the one who can bring amelioration to this mineral, Lear-like landscape is the Romantic poet – note that ‘what will suffice’ sounds more like palliation than what we have so far met in Bloom. One could try to make the statements compatible and say that what the quest aims at is not only a therapy, or say that Bloom changed his mind and wanted to correct his simpler view. If one wanted to preference the ‘therapy in which consciousness heals itself’ essay, it is true to say that it was published after ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, even if written before.155 The ‘Internalization’ essay might not have been as anti-therapeutic if it were not for the peculiar absence from it of The Excursion, since that poem so clearly draws on Wordsworth’s own crisis. But, then again, Bloom was not inclined towards the kind of biographical criticism that has connected the Solitary’s despondency to Wordsworth’s own, so it might not have made a difference. In any case, I think there is something of value to be discovered in taking Bloom where perhaps he did not want to go. He once wrote,

[Kenneth] Burke […] taught me to ask: What is the poet (or critic) trying to do for herself, as a person, by writing her poem or essay? Swerving from the magnificent Burke, I tend to rephrase that as: What is the poet (or critic) trying to do for herself as a poet or critic by composing her poem or essay?156

In turn, I tend from the magnificent Bloom to swerve back. The Romantic internal quest aims at a therapy in which consciousness heals itself, not in the sense of a cure-all, but in the finding of what will suffice, namely good or at least better mental health, a state of non-despondency. The poems under discussion were journeys of self-therapy in the writing and can still be – with, as Wordsworth puts it in ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’, ‘the exertion of a co-operating [not co-opted] power in the mind of the Reader’ – journeys of self-therapy in the reading.157 One might call this ‘applied literary criticism’ in the sense that Niall Ferguson thinks ‘applied history’ should ‘attempt to illuminate current challenges’.158 Even in the ‘Internalization’ essay Bloom talks about Shelley and Keats recovering dreams ‘for the health of life’, and of ‘“A timely utterance gave that thought relief” [being] the Wordsworthian formula for the momentary redemption of the poet’s sanity’.159 Of a later book, How to Read and Why, he said, ‘there is a self-help aspect to it, I’m glad to say.’160

This may all be, as Lionel Trilling believes, rather embarrassing. Referring in Romanticism Reconsidered to Keats’s ‘Sleep and Poetry’, he says:

[T]he great end of poetry, we are told, is “to soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man.”

Such doctrine from a great poet puzzles and embarrasses us. It is, we say, the essence of Philistinism.

The conception of the nature and function of poetry which Keats propounds is, of course, by no means unique with him—it can be understood as a statement of the common assumptions about art which prevailed through the Renaissance up to some point in the nineteenth century, when they began to lose their force.161

I do not know whether it is more or less embarrassing now than it was in 1963, this side of theory, post-structuralism, and New Historicism. Perhaps less, given contemporary concerns about mental health, which in some sense are unavoidable concerns. When he was asked for his aim in philosophy, Wittgenstein answered, ‘To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.’162 Or Wordsworth himself: ‘I know that the multitude walk in darkness. I would put into each man’s hand a lantern to guide him’.163 If Keats wished to soothe his own cares and those of his readers, who are we to blush? A question worthy of attention is how the words on the page can soothe. I also submit this from Johnston and Ruoff:

Late in [Wordsworth’s] life, when in England he had finally become famous, an old Romantic among the emerging generation of Victorian sages, he said he would prefer the designation of “teacher” over any other description of his career. Thus he would be heartened by his strong position in the bastions of Anglo-American academia. Yet he would be both troubled and amazed by societies in which academic experience is, on the one hand, available to historically unprecedented portions of the general population and, on the other hand, seems radically cut off from, or discontinuous with, everyday social reality. In the cultural situation of modern literature, college and university English departments must always guard against becoming academic equivalents of those upper-class drawing rooms from which Wordsworth sought to liberate a truly democratic poetry.164

If, in Romantic and post-Romantic culture, quest narratives have been ‘internalised’, then by implication everyone’s inner life is a kind of quest narrative: ‘all men are questers, even the least’, as Bloom says.165 This is a democratic idea that is perhaps both empowering and unnerving – we are ‘condemned to be free’, in Sartre’s phrase.166 The widely discussed notion that there is a ‘mental health crisis’ suggests people’s need for guidance on their solitary inner quests. In the final essay of the Johnston–Ruoff volume, Dickstein presents a Wordsworth well-suited to helping with this contemporary predicament:

Were I to choose one theme that best crystallizes Wordsworth’s emotional style, I would focus on Wordsworth as a poet of solitude. […] Solitude […] is the condition for Wordsworthian sincerity and self-exploration […] One need not look too far to find solitude inscribed everywhere in [his] poetry, for there is hardly a word that appears more frequently, in more pregnant contexts.

Dickstein’s piece, ‘Wordsworth and Solitude’, is germane to my study, except for a strange absence. He notes that ‘A protagonist of The Excursion is called the Solitary’, but then says no more about this central figure.167

To summarise, it is my contention that for the full richness and penetration of ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’ to be apparent, three ideas absent from Bloom’s essay must be set alongside it: first, an internal quest is, by definition, in pursuit of a state of mind, which means that one way in which to read these poems is as works of self-therapy; secondly, the poem of this kind that was most influential on the second generation of Romantic poets was The Excursion; and thirdly, one of the inspirations for that poem’s Solitary was Wordsworth’s own depression. I propose to take these absences as my starting point, as I believe they are potentially fertile and mutually reinforcing: therapeutic considerations are legitimated by biographical insights that link mental health to poetry, and vice versa.

Chapter 1 sets out the background and composition of The Excursion with a focus on Wordsworth’s autobiographical depictions of states of mind. Chapter 2 is a study of the Solitary and the Wanderer’s attempt to ‘correct’ or – more realistically, in practice – to palliate his despondency. Chapters 3 and 4 address respectively the solitary and his internal quest in Shelley and Keats, from Alastor and Endymion, via ‘Julian and Maddalo’ and Hyperion: A Fragment, through to Prometheus Unbound and The Fall of Hyperion. The conclusion offers a theory of why poetry specifically can palliate despondency.

Bloom actively disliked The Excursion, and I suppose some people actively dislike Bloom, but what poem and critic have in common is that they are capacious and merit revisiting. Bloom may have wanted to secularise and ‘de-idealize’ literature in response to Anglo-Catholic New Criticism, but he believed that ‘we are all fallen angels’, and was religious in precisely the way that he said the so-called ‘atheist’ Shelley was.168 His response to materialist criticism, which he saw as a reduction of literature, was a project of resacralisation – a climbing of Jacob’s ladder, or Childe Harold’s pilgrimage.

The Poet in The Excursion calls the Solitary’s cottage ‘A nook for self-examination framed’ (III. 480). If The Excursion itself was Wordsworth’s creation of a poetic framework for self-examination then this thesis is about what of practical, palliative use was done within that framework, by him and later by Shelley and Keats.

From ‘Despondency Corrected: The “Internalised Quest Romances” of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats (1814–22) as Excursions in Pursuit of Happiness’

Share The Rest is Literature

More A-level bangers from The Book Club. ‘Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.’

The Common Reader

An excellent discussion of the enduringly fascinating Gulliver’s Travels. Zena Hitz is the founder of the Catherine Project, which sounds like something I should get involved with and therefore won’t.

The Honest Broker

Also with Zena Hitz.

How I Write

A conversation with Michael Pollan, whose new book is A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness.

The Lit Path

The first episode from Jack Aldane’s new Substack-based project, The Lit Path, also a discussion of Gulliver’s Travels – highly recommended.

The Lit Path

How Gulliver's Travels Drove Me Sane

On this first episode of The Lit Path, TV Writer, Producer and Author John Yorke sits down with the podcast’s host and producer Jack Aldane to explain why Gulliver's Travels redefined the point of reading for him, after he initially rejecting classical literature at a young age…

Listen now

3 months ago · 1 like · Jack Aldane

The LRB Podcast

This kind of blue-chip LRB content is usually behind the paywall, but this series, Poetry and the Turning World, is free to listen. This is the most recent episode, about the weather in poetry.

Until next month.

Macbeth

The Porter in Macbeth is often called drunken but it might be more accurate to describe him as hungover, woken by the knocking of Macduff and Lennox, having ‘carous[ed] till the second cock’ (II. iii. 18), that is until 3 a.m. On his way to answer the knocking he plays out a macabre fantasy of himself as porter of the gates of hell, concluding that all types of people ‘go the primrose way to th’everlasting bonfire’ (II. iii. 14). This concise description of the tragedy of the Macbeths is followed fluently, or fluidly, by his famous statement to Macduff of the three things provoked by drink: ‘Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes and unprovokes’ (II. iii. 21–22). (John’s got brewer’s droop – he has no spur to provoke the prick of his intent. For Harold Bloom’s speculation that Macbeth is impotent, see The Invention of the Human, p. 528.) Nose-painting is a red nose, sleep in this play, strongly associated with death – ‘The sleeping and the dead’ (II. ii. 63) – is a vulnerability and then an impossibility, and as the son of a leather worker Shakespeare would have known that the piss artist pisseth most.

By the time of the Porter scene the regicide has already occurred, led by Lady Macbeth and lubricated by alcohol. The plan that she initially explains to her husband is that she will knock out Duncan’s chamberlains ‘with wine and wassail’ (I. vii. 70), ‘wassail’ being revelry or carousing, ironic in a play that contains none. Later she implies something stronger, which threatens to poison them, saying ‘I have drugged their possets, / That death and nature do contend about them’ (II. ii. 6–7), a posset being ‘A drink made from hot milk curdled with ale, wine, or other liquor’ (OED).

There is something interesting going on here to do with that whitish fluid antithetical to a play of darkness and death, namely milk. Worrying about her husband’s potency, Lady Macbeth says that he is ‘too full o’th’milk of human kindness’ (I. v. 12), and later in the same scene makes her request to the minsters of hell that they ‘unsex me here […] And take my milk for gall’ (I. v. 39–46). Finally, in her most overt indictment of Macbeth’s manhood, she says,

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                                  I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn
As you have done to this. (I. vii. 58–63)

In this play milk connotes weakness, would be denied a baby, and is replaced by poison and curdled into alcohol, itself an instrument used by the villains to lubricate their way to the everlasting bonfire.

Hamlet

This last point is also true of Hamlet, in which the Prince introduces a similar vocabulary of drinking and, because he is talking about Claudius, does so with contempt:

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Share The Rest is Literature

Cowley Mill Road, an opportunity to think wistfully of the River Isle of Cowley Mill in Fray’s River:

Join Colne Brook where it splits from the Colne…

…and proceed through a jungle of Japanese knotweed:

Take note, Buckinghamshire Council, of the relevant sections of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981.

A farm track to the M25:

Here the river walker is exhorted to use a certain ‘footpath’:

The footpath in question, under eight lanes of motorway, is possibly the wackiest I’ve ever seen. The clearance begins a bit below shoulder height and then shrinks like Dead Man’s Walk, the passage in Newgate along which condemned prisoners walked to be hanged:

Some respite, albeit along a nettly path:

If I may paraphrase Alan Partridge, crossing a footbridge over the M25 is always a thrilling experience:

Though on this occasion doing so was futile, since Iver North sewage treatment works are dead on a Sunday – socially and literally a cul-de-sac:

Cool:

Hello, Slough arm of the Grand Union Canal, my old friend:

Sadly not a Lime bike in the river below:

Inhale the heady odours of blossoming cow parsley:

Hello, Great Western main line, my old friend:

Since I was last here, walking the Colne Valley Trail, someone has painted over a rather good depiction of the Mask. It’s such a shame when artistic vandalism gets vandalised:

Someone has tried to block the path next to the Thorney Interchange – shoddy in both senses:

Take note, Buckinghamshire Council, of the relevant sections of the Highways Act 1980.

In lieu of photos of Colnbrook village, facts. ‘The road that now runs from Hyde Park Corner to Piccadilly Circus [viz. Piccadilly] was part of an ancient route known as “the way to Colnbrook”’ (Brewer’s Dictionary of London Phrase and Fable). I think this is because it was on the Bath Road and there were coaching inns there. In 1107 the name was recorded as ‘Colebroc’ – surprisingly nothing to do with Colne Brook, but meaning ‘brook of a man called Cola’ (A Dictionary of British Place Names). Circa 1990 the Coca-Cola Company set up a warehouse and logistics facility in the area. Coincidence?

The path to Berkyn Manor Farm, where Milton lived from 1635 to 38, is partially blocked. This looks like it is also an intentional blocking, probably to discourage old children on motorbikes:

Hello, what’s gone on here?

Before you get to the skip yard, pass a guard horse:

Hence, vain deluding joys,
The brood of folly without father bred. (John Milton, ‘Il Penseroso’)

On this spot occurred a tremendous piece of redneckery:

Without slowing down, the driver made use of the bus stop’s dropped kerb to mount the pavement and thus avoid the speed bump. This is not what Kenneth Clarke envisioned, but life finds a way.

Level crossing at Wraysbury Lakes:

A Lidl trolley at the very least 1.5 miles from home:

Helpful:

In his short story ‘The Waiting Grounds’, the genie of Shepperton, J. G. Ballard, asks the question, ‘where would you like to be when the world ends?’ After thinking about it for seven years, the narrator says that ‘a satisfactory answer contains an acceptable statement of one’s philosophy and beliefs, an adequate discharge of the one moral debt we owe ourselves and the universe’. Perhaps this means that if you knew where you would like to be when the world ends, you would know the meaning of life.

Colne Brook begins in a thicket of Japanese knotweed and ends by a car cemetery, a cursed boneyard just outside the M25. These waiting grounds are the appropriately named Hythe End – ‘hythe’ meaning ‘haven’ – the end of my waterwalks and a haven at the end of the world. I took a photo of the cars but it doesn’t capture the aura, so here instead is a pig seen in the vicinity:

Finally, on your way into Staines – Nominative Determinism-upon-Thames – pass the tempting footpath to the ever-inspiring Staines Moor, and, if you don’t yet know where you would like to be when the world ends, head back out into the watery wilderness of the green belt’s grey zone.

Blindboy talks about autism.

The Book Club

The Book Club continues its appreciation of A-level bangers with an episode on the novel recently named the second best of all time in the Guardian’s list, Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).

The Booking Club

Without Will Self there would be a Will Self-shaped hole in the culture. Many people recently learned the word ‘fissiparous’ – relating to fission, splitting into pieces – from a widely shared essay in which he says, ‘Britain is now a fissiparous society — fragmented into competing legal, managerial, ethnic, algorithmic and economic jurisdictions’. In this episode of The Booking Club he discusses his new novel, The Quantity Theory of Morality (2026).

Fresh Air

I can’t embed a Spotify link for this, but the episode is ‘David Sedaris wants to be better (at everything)’ (26.5.2026). Sedaris says, ‘I started writing in my diary one day, when I was twenty years old, and I’ve never not done it. […] oh my goodness, the thought of not doing that. Boy, the earth would just spin off of it’s axis.’

Growth Mindset Psychology

This is my favourite recent episode of my friend Sam’s podcast, an interview with Stephen Porges, the psychologist behind polyvagal theory.

My Martin Amis

Jack Aldane speaks to Irish writer and academic Kevin Power about Amis’s 1991 novel, Time’s Arrow.

Novara

I’d label these Novaran insights ‘To be used with some caution’, but I appreciate the way the hosts theorise the bleeding edge, in this case of what they call ‘British weirdness’.

Past Present Future

David Runciman begins a new series on ‘Great Political Fictions’ with Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Like everyone since Neil Postman, Runciman finds the novel’s prophetic quality to be ageing like fine soma.

Subtext

My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow.

Until next month.

Our dress changes with the seasons, from long sleeves and gloves in the winter to shorts and vests in the summer. Some of us wear milestone T-shirts bearing the totemic numerals: 25, 50, 100, 250, 500.

8.40 a.m. Bike lock key: check. Barcode key ring: check.

Some of us travel not to our nearest Parkrun but slightly further, to our favourite. We arrive, lock up, maybe do some stretches. We look around for fellow regulars with whom to feed our Saturdaily dialogues.

We gather to hear the run director welcome us – and here we join in, cult-like – to ‘the best Parkrun in the world’. Sometimes we feel for how patient the run director is having to be with murmuring people and barking dogs.

Then we walk to the start line. On one occasion, just before we were going to set off, the director said to everyone, ‘Raise your hand if you think Parkrun is a good idea.’ Everyone dutifully raised their hands. Then he said, ‘Keep your hand raised if it was your idea’, and we all looked around to see a thin smiling man in sunglasses with his hand up – it was Paul Sinton-Hewitt, who founded Parkrun in 2004.

9 a.m. We are told to ‘Keep off the grass!’ and ‘Mind the puddles!’, or, if there are no puddles, ‘Mind the dust!’ Then there’s a countdown. Sometimes ‘Five, four, three, two, one’, whistle. Or my favourite is the charming amateurism of ‘Ready, steady, go!’

Then we’re off, overgrown schoolboys and girls doing cross-country, thundering towards the first left turn on to a tarmac path. Sometimes a trumpeter-volunteer even plays ‘Chariots of Fire’.

The 5K run is waymarked by kilometre posts, and the going to the first is uphill and for some of us decidedly sluggish. But at the top of the hill we get a view of the City and the Shard, which injects some competitive zeal into the stiff-kneed bouncing descent.

Ours is a one-lapper and what a devotee of the turf would call a ‘galloping course’. We turn left, and left again, pass the three-kilometre post in the shade of a wood, and then emerge on to what, for some reason, I think of as the Plains of Sarum, an old name for Salisbury Plain.

At this point regulars are aware of where everyone belongs, and who’s going slow or fast. The final kilometre is also uphill, but less sluggish than the first, as we give everything we’ve got. Parkrun is ‘a run, not a race’, but a run with certain race-like characteristics.

We finish and take our tokens and barcodes to be scanned by the wonderful volunteers.

At this point the runner-autists try to remember that the end of the run is the start of the real point: being sociable. For some it’s a bit like the locals’ response to Bill Bryson when he moved to Yorkshire:

[G]radually, little by little, they find a corner for you in their hearts, and begin to acknowledge you when they drive past with what I call the Malhamdale wave. This is an exciting day in the life of any new arrival. To make the Malhamdale wave, pretend for a moment that you are grasping a steering wheel. Now very slowly extend the index finger of your right hand as if you were having a small involuntary spasm. (Notes from a Small Island [1995])

Similarly, after running with someone for a couple of years, you might exchange the Parkrun nod. To make the Parkrun nod, establish eye contact, smile, and make a brief inclination of the head. If you’re feeling exuberant you can also initiate a conversation.

You might remember the idea of the ‘big society’ and its laudable attempt to create a culture of volunteerism. Well, never in the field of voluntary enterprise has so much been done for so many as by Parkrun. (Wikipedia comes to mind as a comparison.) This is why the first rule about Parkrun is you do talk about Parkrun – to get your friends to come. It’s not really a cult but it does have a culture, which I’ve tried to give a sense of – my little corner of it.

Once we’ve got our breaths back and had a chat, we disperse. Most of us probably go and enjoy a post-Parkrun coffee and feel that life is good. Then we start looking forward to next time: when Saturday comes.

Dedicated to all the Parkrun volunteers
Image credit ©George Hardwick

Cummings was born in Barnstaple where, after leaving school, he was an apprenticed journalist, but his real passion was naturalism, zoology in particular, which took him to London:

He rejected the prospect of a career in local journalism and aimed to gain a position in natural history at the end of his apprenticeship. In pursuit of this ambition he undertook a strenuous programme of self-education […] In 1912 he took up an appointment at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington as one of the five new permanent staff appointed to the insect room, soon to be renamed the department of entomology. These positions carried considerable research and curatorial responsibility; his appointment was a remarkable achievement for one who had no formal training in the subject. (DNB)

He writes of London ‘spread out before me, a vast campagne’, but also calls it ‘a lonely place’: ‘London bewilders me. At times it is a phantasmagoria, an opium dream out of De Quincey.’2 Here is his journal entry from 26 September 1914 – it is representative of the ‘disappointment’ by which he defines himself:

In short, I lead an unfathomably miserable existence in this dark, gray street, in these drab, dirty rooms—miserable in its emptiness of home, love, human society. […] I visit about two houses in London—the Doctor’s and R——’s [a friend’s] Hotel. I walk along the streets and stare in the windows of private houses, hungry for a little society. It creates in me a gnawing, rancorous discontent to be seeing people everywhere in London—millions of them—and then to realise my own ridiculously circumscribed knowledge of them. I am passionately eager to have acquaintances, to possess at least a few friends. If I die to-morrow, how many persons shall I have talked to? or how many men and women shall I have known? A few maiden aunts and one or two old fossils. I am burning to meet real live men, I have masses of mental stuff I am anxious to unload. But I am ignorant of people as of countries and live in celestial isolation.

This, I fear, reads like a wail of self-commiseration. But I am trying to give myself the pleasure of describing myself at this period truthfully, to make a bid at least for some posthumous sympathy.

Harold Bloom said that one of the reasons we read is that ‘we cannot know enough people profoundly enough’,3 and Cummings here shows the corollary, that we write because we cannot be known by enough people profoundly enough. In this spirit, literary criticism can be a sociable sharing of books and persons, which is my hope for this essay. My edition of The Journal is published by Faber Finds – reprints of ‘found’ classics – which feels appropriate.4 Finding and sharing books must be one of the most pleasurable things you can do – ‘with your clothes on’, as someone once said.

So what kind of person is Cummings?

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The Book Club

Dominic and Tabitha have released several episodes this month, and my favourite was this, on Sally Rooney’s Normal People. I liked the novel a lot, perhaps because I read it seven years late, post-hype.

The Booking Club

Two conversations from Jack Aldane, one with Ross Barkan, editor of Substack-based The Metropolitan Review, and the other with Jay McInerney, who wrote Bright Lights, Big City (1984).

The Common Reader

I have no particular interest in Agatha Christie but this was so good I loved it anyway.

The Exchange

New Statesman editor Tom McTague interviews Anthony Seldon about the latter’s book The Path of Light: Walking to Auschwitz.

The Honest Broker

The Godzilla vs. Kong of literary Substacks.

The Long Read

A thoughtful, first-hand exploration of what AI is doing to English teaching.

New Books in Literary Studies

This caught my eye because I attended David Womersley’s lectures on Jonathan Swift in 2011. He has written a new book called Thinking Through Shakespeare, and Womersley’s story of its origin alone is fascinating on Shakespeare’s uniqueness. He recounts what he was told, by the director of a theatre in Munich, about taking productions of Shakespeare around the world: ‘it was clear that there was always some kind of palpable connection between the audience and what was on-stage, and […] that was not true of other things they put on’. Incidentally, the New Books Network recently published its thirty thousandth episode!

The New Society

The title is clickbaited but this is a good episode: Haitian film-maker Raoul Peck on what Orwell means to him.

Past Present Future

And more Orwell. This is the first of a four-part miniseries on ‘Orwell’s War’ from David Runciman. I don’t agree with everything Runciman says – for example, I don’t think there was something ‘clownish’ about Orwell being anti-war up until 1939, even if that turned out to have been a mistaken position. But Runciman is always worth listening to, and I appreciate his treatment of Orwell as still indispensable. (I’ve written about Orwell here.)

Until next month.

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                                               I hate the Moor:
And it is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets
He has done my office: I know not if’t be true,
But I, for mere suspicion in that kind,
Will do as if for surety. (I. iii. 375–79)

This is the speech Coleridge described as ‘the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity’. Do you believe in the rumour Iago has heard?

In the next scene Iago witnesses Cassio kiss Emilia – ‘’tis my breeding / That gives me this bold show of courtesy’ (II. i. 109–10) – and responds,

Sir, would she give you so much of her lips
As of her tongue she oft bestows on me,
You would have enough. (II. i. 111–13)

Her ‘tongue’ here could connote kissing, but more overtly suggests that she talks too much. When Desdemona defends Emilia (‘Alas, she has no speech’ [II. i. 114]), Iago goes on:

Marry, before your ladyship, I grant,
She puts her tongue a little in her heart
And chides with thinking. (II. i. 117–19)

He claims – to use the phrase he coined in the first scene of the play – that sometimes she does not wear her heart upon her sleeve. Iago goes on with his sexist comedy about women being ‘pictures out of doors, bells in your parlours’ etc. (II. i. 121–). In this scene it is sort of true that Emilia ‘chides with thinking’, in that she says little in response to her husband’s provocations. Then again, what she does say is to disagree and contradict him: ‘You have little cause to say so’; ‘You shall not write my praise’; ‘How if fair and foolish?’ (II. i. 120, 127, 147).

In Act 3, Scene 1 Emilia unwittingly(?) aids Iago’s plans by helping to arrange for Cassio to speak privately to Desdemona. Then in Act 3, Scene 3 she knowingly gives Iago the handkerchief. Having said that, he doesn’t have much choice in the matter – stage directions in most editions say that he takes/snatches it.

In Act 3, Scene 4 we find that in her cynicism about men Emilia somewhat resembles her husband: ‘They are all but stomachs, and we all but food’ (III. iv. 108). There’s a parallel between this and Act 2, Scene 1, where Iago says what he thinks women are like. Emilia also uses that resonant J-word:

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       jealous souls will not be answered so;
They are not ever jealous for the cause,
But jealous for they’re jealous: it is a monster
Begot upon itself, born on itself. (III. iv. 166–69)

She is referring, in effect, to motiveless jealousy. John Vyvyan has a good line on this: he says, ‘Iago is jealousy, and jealousy is the flaw in Othello’s character.’ But is there something self-fulfilling about Iago’s and Emilia’s cynical expectations that the other (sex) will be cynical? More evidence relating to this comes in Act 4.

In Act 4, Scene 2, Emilia defends Desdemona’s reputation to Othello, then Iago:

I will be hanged if some eternal villain,
Some busy and insinuating rogue,
Some cogging, cozening slave, to get some office,
Have not devised this slander[.] (IV. ii. 146–49)

The slander that Desdemona is a whore, that is. This exchange is obviously heavy with dramatic irony, since the villain, her husband, is standing right next to her. In each production the actress playing Emilia, and the director, can decide whether to imply that she already suspects Iago.

Then we see a contrast between the two women. Desdemona says, ‘If any such there be, heaven pardon him!’, while Emilia responds, ‘A halter pardon him!’ (IV. ii. 151–52), i.e. a hangman’s noose. Mercy and justice; forgiveness and revenge; ‘an eye for an eye’ and ‘turn the other cheek’ (see Matthew 5: 38–39).

Act 4 ends with Emilia’s longest speech, but the build-up is important too. The scene begins with Othello ordering Desdemona to ‘Dismiss your attendant’ (IV. iii. 7–8), which she never does, so the entire scene (including the tender ‘willow song’) is a kind of transgression of the feminine against the masculine. Martin L. Wine:

The so-called willow or bedchamber scene between Desdemona and Emilia [iv iii] is, as Carol Thomas Neely points out, the only scene of genuine friendship in the entire play and is sadly and ironically ‘sandwiched between two exchanges of Iago and Roderigo’[.]

Even if Emilia sometimes ‘puts her tongue a little in her heart’, this scene does not show her doing so with Desdemona, as Iago alleged. She says forthrightly, ‘I wish you had never seen him [Othello]’ (IV. iii. 18).

Some rare frustration breaks out of Desdemona – ‘O, these men, these men!’ – and she asks Emilia a question: ‘Dost thou in conscience think […] That there be women do abuse [deceive] their husbands[?]’ (IV. iii. 63–65). This introduces a fascinating dialogue for understanding Emilia:

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EMILIA   There be some such, no question.
DESDEMONA   Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?
EMILIA   Why, would not you?
DESDEMONA   No, by this heavenly light!
EMILIA   Nor I neither by this heavenly light:
I might do’t as well i’th’dark.
DESDEMONA   Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?
EMILIA   The world’s a huge thing: it is a great price
For a small vice.
DESDEMONA   In troth, I think thou wouldst not.
EMILIA   In troth, I think I should, and undo’t when I had done. Marry, I would not do such a thing for a joint-ring, nor for measures of lawn, nor for gowns, petticoats, nor caps, nor any petty exhibition: but for all the whole world, why, who would not make her husband a cuckold to make him a monarch? (IV. iii. 67–80)

What was your answer to the earlier question of whether you believed the rumour Iago claims he has heard, that Emilia has slept with Othello? Even if we still do not buy the idea that she has, she says here in terms that she would be willing to cuckold her husband. It is just one example in the play of Iago saying something bad about someone and then – in the Iagoan world of Othello – it turning out to be true: Othello is a threat to Desdemona, Emilia is a would-be cuckold, Cassio is a bit of an arse. My final contrarian take on what Emilia says is that in a way she is being loyal to her Machiavellian (and perhaps sexually weird?) husband. Wouldn’t Iago think it a good deal to be cuckolded if it made him a monarch?

The scene ends with Emilia’s speech. I think of it as being analogous to Shylock’s speech in The Merchant of Venice: ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ etc. (III. i. 40–49). Hath not a woman (wandering) eyes? Hath not a woman a stomach? asks Emilia:

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     I do think it is their husbands’ faults
If wives do fall. Say that they slack their duties
And pour our treasures into foreign laps,
Or else break out in peevish jealousies,
Throwing restraint upon us, or say they strike us,
Or scant our former having in despite:
Why, we have galls, and though we have some grace,
Yet have we some revenge. Let husbands know
Their wives have sense like them: they see and smell
And have their palates both for sweet and sour,
As husbands have. What is it that they do
When they change us for others? Is it sport?
I think it is. And doth affection [desire] breed it?
I think it doth. Is’t frailty that thus errs?
It is so too. And have not we affections?
Desires for sport? And frailty, as men have?
Then let them use us well: else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instruct us so. (IV. iii. 89–106)

If ‘They are all but stomachs’ is a claim of victimisation, this speech is instead a claim of equality. But consider a disturbing thought, namely that in Emilia’s case equality with her husband might be related to complicity in his crimes.

Tony Bromham states,

Emilia’s […] speeches […] suggest that the husband’s treatment of his wife is an encouragement to her to take lovers. […] there is something of Iago’s cynicism about Emilia’s speeches on married life and one can only feel that there is a level of bitterness here which derives from her own experience of being married to him. She believes it is right to respond to hurts done to her by hurting in return[.]

As if Emilia and Iago are locked in a ‘gender war’ of self-fulfilling sexist assumptions.

Emilia experiences ‘a divided duty’, to employ Desdemona’s earlier phrase (I. iii. 197), between Iago and Desdemona. (So often the terms required to analyse Othello are to be found in the play.) When does she definitively shift her loyalty from the former to the latter? In some productions it is in Act 4, Scene 2, during her ‘some eternal villain’ speech, but if not then, it happens unambiguously in the final act. Her bond with her mistress defines her throughout – it is the source of her utility to Iago and ultimately his reason for killing her. In this play only Desdemona deserves her good reputation, hence, as Emilia puts it, it is to ‘belie [slander] her’, as Othello does, to say ‘she was a whore’ (V. ii. 153–54).

Emilia overhears, without quite knowing what she hears, Othello murder Desdemona, and is then told by him, ‘Thy husband knew it all.’ ‘My husband?’, she responds (V. ii. 161–62), and utters these words six times over the course of the scene.

In her last interaction with Iago, like her first, he tells her to be quiet: ‘charm your tongue […] hold your peace’ (V. ii. 209, 248). If Desdemona is something of a sacrifice, Emilia is something of a martyr. For indicting him so vehemently, Iago kills her. ‘O, lay me by my mistress’ side!’, she says, adding to what Lodovico calls ‘the tragic loading of this bed’ (V. ii. 271, 408).

Harold Bloom calls Emilia ‘a figure of intrepid outrage, willing to die for the sake of the murdered Desdemona’s good name.’

Emilia’s heroic victory over Iago is one of Shakespeare’s grandest ironies, and appropriately constitutes the play’s most surprising dramatic moment […] That Emilia should lose her worldly wisdom, and become as free as the north wind, was the only eventuality that Iago could not foresee. And his failure to encompass his wife’s best aspect—her love for and pride in Desdemona—is the one lapse for which he cannot forgive himself.

Emilia truly is Desdemona’s lieutenant and ensign.

Step 1

Lime bikes are not bicycles. They are mopeds.

Step 2

Leaving a large, heavy, ugly lump of plastic wherever you like is not ‘docking’, it’s fly-tipping.

Step 3

Lime bikes are the parakeets of the pavement.

Step 4

My government will proscribe LimeBike, Inc. as a terrorist group.

Step 5

When passing a Lime bike that is blocking the pavement you gotta give it that hawk tuah. Spit on that thang.

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Step 6

Fuck you and the Lime you rode in on.

Step 7

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a Lime bike riding over a human face – forever.

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