A new life of Borrow
Peter Quennell
Twoor three lines quoted out of context by popularl ineanthologists and the Publishers of illustrated Christmas calen- dars have done a good deal of posthumous damage to George Borrow's reputation. In its proper setting Petulengro's speech, where he bids the Narrator give up thoughts death of dea and take comfort from the beauty of the world — 'there's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon and stars ... there's likewise the wind on the heath' — is no mere copybook effusion but a Piece of sound advice, addressed not to a weakly, sentimental youth, but to Borrow himself, who was robust, pugnacious, Much-travelled, though, at the same time, a lifelong neurasthenic, ridden by a dreadful Malady he called 'the Horrors'. Few of Borrow's bravest contemporaries had wandered so far afield, or been so obstin- ately adventurous; and his remarkable looks he was six feet three inches tall, uncom- monly handsome and, since his early manhood, had had a shock of thick white hair — suited the strangeness of his character. He was a supremely self-centred Man, the occupant of a mysterious universe that revolved around his own identity; and other human beings only acquired significance should they happen briefly to traverse his path. In Lavengro, his ad- Mirable autobiography, they emerge, are quickly and sharply described, but .then, almost immediately disappear. As Spanish was among the numerous languages he read and spoke, Calderon's La Vida es Sueno, 'Life is a Dream', must have been a drama that he knew well; and during his poverty stricken literary apprenticeship, when he was troubled, he tells us, by a host of similarly disturbing doubts, 'peculiar ideas With respect to everything being a lying dream began also to revive'. At a later stage, he would subtitle Lavengro 'A bream, partly Of study, partly of Adven- ture'. His narrative has a dreamlike in- consequence — facts and fantasies are in- terwoven — and the startling pictorial vividness of certain dreams that haunt one's Memory.
Borrow had always been studious; and his adventures started at an early age. The second son of a hard-worked professional soldier — Sergeant-Major Thomas did not reach commissioned rank for many years tte was born in 1803, and, until he was 13, wandered around England, Scotland and ,Ireland, following his father's regiment.
he landscapes he knew and loved best were still almost untouched by the In- dustrial Revolution; and some of the charm of Lavengro we owe to the skill with which extraord- inary recreates them and recalls their traord- inary inhabitants — horse-copers, tinkers, bruisers, grooms, an Irish warlock, an an- cient gatherer of snakes a rascally London
wm
publisher, an old applewoman and receiver
m met on London
Bridge, stolen goods, whom he don Bridge, besides such wild characters as David Haggart and the notorious John Thurtell, both of them destined to be hung, and, of course, his horde of gipsy friends, possibly distant relations, too, through his mother, Ann Pefrement. Lavengro, which is certainly his master- piece, came out in 1851, and was badly treated by reviewers. 'It is not an with the licence of fic-
tion', even
tion', announced the Athenaeum's critic. The Bible in Spain, however, published in enormously successful; five on were printed w
1843, had been enor
editid between January and July; and Richard Ford, the celebrated author of a Handbook for Travellers in Spain, whom Borrow had seen much of on his journeys, described it as 'Gil Bias with a touch of Bunyan'. Imaginative, though far less imaginative than Lavengro, it is a record of the only purposeful and carefully organised expedition, apart from a previous visit to Russia, that he ever undertook. Since 1833, Borrow had been the travelling agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society, an Evangelical enterprise to which he had been recommended by a pious East Anglian Quaker. The Society sacked him in 1840; they considered him, his solemn employers said, a trifle impetuous and vain- glorious, and apt to pay somewhat excessive attention to 'a personage called number one'. But, meanwhile, he had distributed 'nearly 14,000 copies of the Scriptures' throughout a hostile country racked by civil war. The Bible in Spain is a continuously in- teresting and exciting book, which deserved its large sale. Yet neither great success nor partial failure had much effect upon the man himself. He remained solitary and self- centred, a prey to the hideous attacks of manic-depressive gloom that regularly pro- strated him. He seems, moreover, despite his solid masculine frame, to have lacked any vigorous sexual desires. In Lavengro he tells us how, once he had fought and con- quered 'The Flaming Tinman', he had liv- ed, probably for a whole month, with the beautiful virago Isopel Berners; but, . as David Williams points out in his sym- pathetic new biography, the episode ends on an ambiguous note:
'Well, Armenian is the speech of the people of that place, and I should like to teach it to you ... Belle, I will now give you a lesson in Armenian'. '1 suppose you mean no harm ..."Not in the least? I merely propose the thing to pre- vent our occasionally feeling uncomfor- table with each other ...' This is enough for Isopel, who soon afterwards informs him that she hopes to leave England.
'I am convinced' wrote Borrow's beloved elder brother John, 'that your want of suc- cess in life is more owing to your being unlike other people than to any other cause'; and George's unlikeness to the rest of mankind moulded his personality and shaped his talents. Having shunned Isopel Berner's embraces, he eventually married a prosperous middle-aged widow, who managed his affairs, copied his manuscripts and mothered him until her death. In almost every field his career was a pattern of contrasts. He had a passion for scholarly pursuits and claimed to have mastered some 30 languages; but his scholarship was often suspect, and he made curious linguistic howlers, nicknaming his wife 'Carreta', for example, which means a Castilian cart, instead of 'Carita', which signifies 'little dear'. As a prose-writer, Borrow's native gifts are less difficult to pin down. His styles was workmanlike, but sometimes com- monplace. Yet again and again it is il- luminated and transfigured by the magic powers of memory. What had once stirred his imagination, he could never quite forget; and Lavengro consists of a series of episodes, each a vivid evocation of a separate scene or personality — David Hag- gart, the future murderer, gazing forth from Edinburgh Castle, the old ap- plewoman reading Defoe in her booth, or sombre, thick-set John Thurtell striding through a horse-fair. I doubt if Borrow's works are widely read today — the modern reader needs more lurid stuff. But David William's biography, which is clear, sensi- ble and well-balanced, should put The Bible and Lavengro into at least a few ap- preciative hands.
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