Remaindered Rubaiyat
Christopher Hawtree
With Friends Possessed: a Life of Edward Fitzgerald Robert Bernard Martin (Faber & Faber £17.50)
Publishers rarely admit to failure. They always contrive to give the genial im- pression that even their most absurd pro- ducts have been a success. 'The reputation of some books has actually been assisted, if not made, by remaindering them' re- marked Stanley Unwin in The Truth About Publishing. Hardly a day can AO by without an author, who has already been given a minimal advance, being told that his work is now to be remaindered and that it would be as well to think about the first edition of Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam.
His first thought is likely to be that if he were to find a copy, which was knocked down to a penny two years after publica- tion, all his problems would be solved in the time that it takes to walk to Sotheby's. Further consideration, such as is afforded. by Professor Martin's new magnificent biography, would show that the transla- tion, far from being the casual amusement of a leisured existence independent of 'market forces', was in fact the product of as painful a life as endured by any author. With the publication of his letters a few years ago in the four-volume Princeton edition, Fitzgerald's life could be seen more broadly and in more detail than before. 'The "Age of Chivalry seems gone forever" so far as Biography is concerned,' he wrote to Leslie Stephen. With Friends Possessed has all the elegance and honesty which combined to make Professor Mar- tin's Tennyson one of the most convincing accounts of the Victorian age. 'Be not solitary, be not idle,' quoted Fitzgerald in one of his commonplace books. (Professor Martin imagines that he took this from one of Johnson's letters, but it is as likely that he knew it from the end of Burton's Anatomy, which he had been reading in 1842.) His life's pattern was formed by the difficulty which he found in maintaining a balance between those two injunctions. In the company of his friends, celebrated or otherwise, he appeared as jovial as a Sydney Smith, and in the welcome solitude of the country he none the less found the torments of a Cowper, which left him able only to potter about, play music, look over old battlefields on Carlyle's behalf, read, and, paradoxically enough, write the stream of letters by which, with the transla- tion, he is now remembered. 'By far the chief incident in my life for the last month has been the reading of dear old Sped- ding's Paper on the Merchant of Venice,' is a typical remark. Recurrent comedy is provided by the acquisition of pictures which he readily attributed to some Master or other — 'even in Norwich he had no trouble in finding a Giorgione,' comments Professor Martin; he would then set about renovating, improving and slashing these priceless works in order to recoup his money, but with invariable lack of success.
'I somehow detest my own scrolloping surname,' he remarked towards the end of his life, rarely spelling it out and keeping it from most of his title-pages. (In the mean- while, the OED Supplement has credited Virginia Woolf with inventing the adjective in a diary entry for 1923.) He should have been called Purcell, but such was his mother's fortune that his wayward, absent- minded father thought it only right that her family's name should be continued. The money, despite his father's disastrous busi- ness schemes, remained sufficient to keep Fitzgerald in a life that seemed to bind him in a close and sometimes embittered rela- tionship with his mother. None the less, Cambridge had left him with a love of 'We're looking for a surgeon-fundraiser.' small rooms where everything was to hand. and while such friends as Thackeray and Tennyson achieved success in their larger worlds, he seemed to remain a content, distant observer.
It is in the most chivalrous manner that Professor Martin's narrative brings out Fitzgerald's involvement with a succession of young men. To judge by his surviving correspondence with Thackeray, he was tolerant of debauchery but remained de- cidedly remote from it himself. Further speculation would be as pointless as it would be vulgar, and it is only necessary to reflect on the effect that these men, from William Browne to the somewhat Teutonic-looking fisherman 'Posh' Fletch- er, made on Fitzgerald's life. Their marriage often provided the inevitable crisis, but the friendship with a young scholar, Edward Cowell, brought to his attention those Persian manuscripts in the Bodleian. For the doomed marriage that Fitzgerald him' self had so nobly and foolishly made to the .daughter, Lucy, of his dead friend, the 'Quaker poet' Bernard Barton, the study of these provided all the consolation that his earlier work had done for his stretches of loneliness.
`So much of inferior work seems to me to hang as a weight on all that better Fart which Posterity will want to preserve,' he once wrote of Tennyson in the characteris- tically double-edged way that he regarded many of his friends' books. The Rubaiyat, in the various editions Fitzgerald prepared after the famous cheap-box discovery, has attracted an amount of commentary and dispute all the way down to the Robert Graves version, whose preface was as cantankerous as the translation was dull. Yet, as Fitzgerald wrote of one of Ins earlier efforts which now only hangs on the later, 'I am persuaded that, to keep Life in the work . . . the Translator . . . must re- cast that original into his own likeness, more or less: the less like his original, s° much the worse: but still, the live DV better than the dead Lion.' As Professor Martin says, in placing the Rubtiiyiir in that diversely-questioning year of 1859 which saw Adam Bede, On Liberty and Origin Species, it is an 'improvisation' on the original quatrains, but one which springs as deeply and mysteriously from its author s being as does any classic piece of writing; Years before, he had jocularly remarked(); a friend, Milnes, who 'I hear, talks of publishing a popular edition of his poems. He means a cheap one.' Such has been the number of editions, ornate, elegant or. perfunctory, that the Rubaiyat has received that, uniquely, the common reader has rejoiced to concur with Ezra Pound wherl,, he said, 'Fitzgerald's "Omar" is worth a° the Persian scholarship of a century.' Pro- fessor Martin's own scholarship is borne with such wit and ease that he is able to, suggest both Fitzgerald's indolence and consequent misery while providing the reader with so much enjoyment that With Friends Possessed deserves to be remain- dered as soon as possible.
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