Michael Dibdin - A Rich Full Death

We now learn two very interesting things: that Porphyria has come secretly from a dinner party to visit her lover; and that although she loves him, she is not willing to make the final sacrifice, and break the presumably illustrious ties that make their love illicit: ‘She too weak, for all her heart’s endeavour, to set its struggling passion free from pride, and vainer ties dissever, and give herself to me for ever.’ At that moment, however, she loves him; ‘happy and proud’-for he too is proud! — ‘I knew Porphyria worshipped me.’

What is he to do, her lover? He knows the moment will not, cannot last, for she must return to the realities of her dreary marriage, contracted for base motives, but which she has not the spirit, or the will-call it what you like-to break. ‘… I debated what to do. That moment she was mine, mine, fair, perfectly pure and good: I found a thing to do, and all her hair in one long yellow string I wound three times her little throat around, and strangled her.’

Is that not disgusting? I find it so-or rather the total lack of any hint of censure on the poet’s part. To discuss these things so calmly, so coolly-well, it is beyond me. But there is worse to come, for what does the lover do now? Recoil in horror at the deed he has unthinkingly committed in an instant of frenzy he can never sufficiently regret?

No! On the contrary, like the vilest fiend in existence, he glories in the dead body at his side-glories in it equally as it is a beautiful female body, and as it is dead, and therefore will-less, utterly passive and given up to him. What use he makes of his opportunity is left to the reader’s imagination, but so heated is the language Mr Browning employs that there can be little doubt as to what is intended: ‘As a shut bud that holds a bee I warily oped her lids: again laughed the blue (!) eyes … and I untightened next the tress … her cheek once more blushed bright beneath my burning kiss …’

The almost hysterical alliteration in that last phrase could hardly be clearer in its implications, I think.

But the vilest cut is saved for last, where the ‘lover’ seeks to possess not merely Porphyria’s body but her soul as well. For, all passion spent, he lays her head upon his shoulder-commenting upon how the situation is changed, for now he is dominant: ‘The smiling rosy little head, so glad it has its utmost will, that all it scorned at once is fled, and I, its love, am gained instead!’ In other words, the murderer claims that he was merely fulfilling his victim’s ‘darling one wish’ in killing her. He need not feel guilty! He has no motive for remorse! She wanted to be his, and now she is-for ever. The poem ends chillingly:

And thus we sit together now,

And all night long we have not stirred,

And yet God has not said a word!

To be sure, the piece has a certain power, but of what variety? If it is powerful, it is as a ‘penny dreadful’ is powerful, and what has that to do with Literature? Could the Shelley or the Keats Browning so admires have ever dreamt of penning such stuff?

My purpose in mentioning it, however, as I said, was not to discuss its literary merits, but rather to elicit Browning’s views on the quite extraordinary parallels between this poem of his and the murder of Isabel Eakin.

‘I fear it is less interesting than you seem to think,’ my companion replied lightly when I drew his attention to the similarities. ‘Both, after all, are productions of the same mind.’

I was stunned: for a moment I thought he was confessing to having murdered Isabel!

‘That poem was written some twenty years ago, in London,’ he went on. ‘Nevertheless, when confronted with the evidence that a murder had occurred at the villa-which is just in sight, by the way; look, over the wall there! — I at once dreamed up a theory woven from the same threads: the mad jealous lover alone with his faithful-faithless mistress in the isolated country house. A theory, I might add, which now shows every sign of having been as far removed from reality as the fantasies of poor Porphyria’s over-zealous lover.’

‘Was the piece based upon an account of an actual crime?’ I enquired.

‘Not at all. I dreamed it all up.’

‘How remarkable.’

‘Do I remark a note of disapproval in your voice, Mr Booth?’

I hesitated. Should I risk making my criticisms known to Browning? If I decided to do so, it was not out of any wish to match wits with one so far superior to me in the matters under discussion-for what do my opinions matter? — but rather with that thought again in the back of mind that I might one day be Robert Browning’s Boswell. In that case, I will have to be more than merely sycophantic, agreeable and easy: half the good things of Johnson’s we have exist only because Boswell provoked him so, worrying epigrams out of him like a sow rooting for truffles.

‘I confess there is an element of perversity in the poem which I find troubling. I understand, of course, that it is intended as a character sketch of an imaginary personage. But there is a sense in which the poem seems to dwell gratuitously upon morbid elements-to take, almost, a kind of pleasure in them. Do you really think that Literature should concern itself with such matters?’

‘You pose very large questions, Mr Booth. Tell me-what do you think Literature should concern itself with?’

I did not much care for him turning thus on me, in the Socratic manner, but I was ready for him.

‘With the True and the Beautiful which Keats said were one and the same.’

Browning shot me a keen look.

‘Bravo. Any friend of John Keats is a friend of mine. But the problem with his famous definition-which, incidentally, I most fervently believe to be as true as it is beautiful-is that like all great truths it balances perilously above an abyss of nonsense, where most of those who quote it quite lose their heads. What did Keats mean? That there is a class of things which we call true because they take after their ideal parent, and which you may recognise by their pretty features? Because in that case he was talking nonsense-and cloying, feeble, wishy-washy nonsense at that.

‘But I believe he was saying something much stronger and stranger. I believe Keats meant that Truth is Beauty: that anything-literally anything-is beautiful, provided only that we are forced to recognise it-at gunpoint, or pen-point! — as true . In that moment of recognition the foullest passions, the most loathsome cruelties, the dreariest depths of a madman’s soul, assume the quality we call Beauty. Not because they cease to be evil, but because they tell us about what it means to be human — about ourselves.

‘Porphyria’s lover was mad, of course, but what lover is completely sane? He treated his mistress as a chattel without a soul, a mere object he could dispose of to suit his whims, but do not thousands of husbands treat their wives in exactly the same way? “Aye, but they do not kill them!” you say. I agree-not openly, at any rate, although some might consider a nice quick strangulation merciful compared with the lingering torments of many a conventional marriage. But what matters if the actor rants and raves and overplays his part so long as the things he says are things we have said to ourselves in our innermost hearts, so long as we recognise them as true?

‘And that is the only kind of beauty that interests me any longer, Mr Booth. The lyric flights, the exquisite figures, the memorable and the mighty line-all that I renounce to my wife, who as everyone agrees is so much better at them than I. All I claim is my right to sweat away over my ugly little misshapen lump of Truth. And what better place to start than with this grotesque affair we are engaged on? But I fear we are going to be disappointed, for there is no inscription here, so far as I can see.’