Lashing out
Roy Fuller Sloinburne: The Portrait Of A Poet Philip Henderson (Routledge and Kegan Paul £4.95).
The enormous (and unexpurgated) edition of Swinburne's letters, the last volume of which aPPeared a dozen years ago, has added spice nto any subsequent biography of the poet. holarly freedom has been extended to the niographer writing for the general reader, so that we have in Mr Henderson's book the 1,Pstssima verba of Swinburne's epistolary !..lagellation fantasies and obscene satire. everal questions arise. Which Swinburnian Perversions were real and which remained cill.ere fantasy? What relation had this side of 4,Irn to his poetry? Are we in danger of losing `"e Poetry for ever to the porn? , It seems clear that Swinburne used to visit he Grove of the Evangelist' — the house in 't John's Wood where, as Edmund Gosse cflescribed it, "ladies received in luxuriously tIrnished rooms gentlemen who they consented to chastise for large sums." It is far less clear whether Swinburne was in adult life an aetiVe homosexual. It is extremely unlikely )1.at he slept with the monkey owned by his rriend George Powell when he stayed with hirn in Normandy in 1868, and even more so that the animal, after being hanged by one of Ille.houseboys in a fit of jealousy, was served til;c4led to a guest, as has been alleged. On e whole Mr Henderson is level-headed about I this, as he admirably is throughout. We !nay agree with him that Swinburne was Probably always incapable of a normal sexual trelationship with a woman (Adah Menken, of 'Naked Mazeppa' circus act fame, °Mplained that she "couldn't make him un
stand that biting's no use"). But he might
have happily married his cousin Mary rrdon who so extraordinarily encouraged Irri in his youthful fantasies of flogging and Wrote baby-talk to him in their middle-age.
How narcissistic and unreal his fantasies were may be seen by his outrage at the fantasies — and, indeed, irregular sexual conduct — of others. For all his fervour, erotic and political, he often puts out conventional Victorian views.
With this in mind one's tempted to assert that the sexual side of Swinburne is of no more importance than any man's peculiar conduct in private on occasions; the difference being that Swinburne blabbed, being an inveterate blabber. But of course he was in other respects also a sensationally odd character, so that the poetry comes from an eccentric, not from an ordinary chap with a funny streak. No wonder much of it is odd poetry.
Mr Henderson depicts with the greatest sharpness Swinburne's physical characteristics and behaviour. No doubt some of his quotations from eye-witnesses are well-worn, but he seems to have got them all in and at the right times, beginning with Bertram Mitford's remarkable description of Swinburne at Eton: "strangely tiny. His limbs were small and delicate; and his sloping shoulders looked far too weak to carry his great head, the size of which was exaggerated by the tousled mass of red hair standing out almost at right angles to it ..." By a stroke of inspiration, the jacket of the book reproduces in colour William Bell Scott's stunning portrait of the youthful poet, eight-angled red hair and all. I don't think Mr Henderson at all overemphasises the tiresomeness of Swinburne's conduct, which must have been monumental. Unlike the similar tiresomeness of Dylan Thomas, it was not confined to periods of inebriation (though that condition, of course, made matters worse: speaking for him before the Committee of the Arts Club, Whistler said: "You accuse him of drunkenness—well, that's his defence.") His lies, perpetual twitchings and unreliability; his alcoholic stupors and diarrhoea; his marathon readings of his own poetry; his arrogance with those he considered his inferiors — these are some of the traits that would have made one avoid him more than most poets.
The danger is that the sadism and the squalor get irremovably in the way of the verse — which erects its own formidable barriers of copiousness, monotony and sheer silliness. Mr Henderson is a discriminating literary critic and has some wise and helpful words on various aspects of Swinburne's poetry, but I'm not sure he hasn't been too far carried away from it by the admittedly fascinating but inevitably lower-toned business of the life. His reply might be that it was no part of his purpose to provide a detailed indication of what the contemporary, sophisticated reader might rewardingly look for in Swinburne's work. Yet I for one lapped up all he has to give us of nourishment from his fresh perusal of the huge oeuvre.
I was glad he reminded us, in this connection, of Ezra Pound's brilliant few pages on Swinburne (which may be found in the Literary Essays of Ezra Pound). Though these first came out in 1918 (as a review in Poetry) their pros and cons are still illuminating. But what is dated in Pound's assessment is his sympathy with the bohemian — the bourgeois-flaying — side of Swinburne. Swinburne's stand for literary eroticism, for the Instinctual, the 'free' sides of Blake and Whitman, has been only too well maintained in this century. He was also, more importantly and as Mr Henderson emphasises, a poet whose learning can almost be put beside that of Milton — and sometimes his accuracy as a nature poet can be put beside Tennyson's. His technical expertise was as dazzling as any other English poet's, and though it may seem artificial to the moderns I'm sure it has much to teach. Treasures of these kinds are to be found pretty well everywhere among the sludge of the complete verse, and Mr Henderson is right, for instance, to devote two of his comparatively few purely literary pages to Swinburne's parodies, which are pure gold, One doesn't see a Swinburne announced In the Longman's 'Annotated English Poets. series (maybe a one-volume collected poems Is a physical impossibility), but an attractive, enlightened edition, such as that would surelY prove to be, would do most for Swinburne's reputation. Selections are apt to be too personal or too hidebound or too purely fashionable to be of real worth. Let's hope this good and readable life will help keep alive the interest in the verse against the day of a new and reasonably portable edition.
Roy Fuller has been Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford.
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