Richard Holmes - Sidetracks

All the same, in poetry the drug-supported and drug-fed imagination does produce quite characteristic and brilliant effects. Most notably, there is a combination of very bright, very minute, highdefinition images with a completely contrasting sense of entirely vague sweeping movements, undefined expanses and landscapes, and massive blurred shiftings of light and shade. In Chatterton’s earliest ‘African Eclogue’, which is dated Shoreditch May 2nd 1770, about a week or ten days after he had arrived in London, these characteristics are already recognizable. The poem is called ‘Narva and Mored’, the names of two young African lovers. The central passage begins:

Three times the virgin, swimming on the breeze,

Danc’d in the shadow of the mystic trees:

When, like a dark cloud spreading to the view

The first-born sons of War and Blood pursue.

Swift as the elk they pour along the plain

Swift as the flying clouds distilling rain

Swift as the boundings of the youthful roe

They course around and lengthen as they go.

Like the long chain of rocks, whose summits rise

Far in the sacred regions of the skies

Upon whose top the black’ning tempest lours,

Whilst down its side the gushing torrent pours,

Like the long cliffy mountains which extend

From Lorbar’s cave, to where the nations end,

Which sink in darkness, thick’ning and obscure

Impenetrable, mystic, and impure,

The flying terrors of the war advance

And round the sacred oak, repeat the dance.

The most extraordinary thing is the almost total dissolution of the formal eighteenth-century couplets into a rushing, shapeless, undirected torrent of images which gives free expression to the wildness and passion of the African tribal dance, as Chatterton understood and imagined it. The dance is both a dance of war by the tribesmen, and a dance of ecstatic sexual expectancy by the young virgin Mored (‘Black was her face, as Togla’s hidden cell, / Soft as the moss where hissing adders dwell’). It is so typical of Chatterton that Lorbar’s cave is impenetrable, mystic and impure. The love of Narva and Mored ends in simultaneous union and destruction: ‘Lock’d in each other’s arms, from Hyga’s cave, / They plunged relentless to a wat’ry grave’. If the passage reminds one of something else, it will turn out to be the opening section of Coleridge’s opium dream-poem ‘Kubla Khan’, written some thirty years later.

In these ‘African Eclogues’, as in the journalistic prose tales and articles Chatterton dashed off for money, and indeed in everything else he wrote during these last four months, one is continually coming across lines or whole passages which recall the reader – with a sudden frisson of horror and pity – to the situation Chatterton himself was in. The most terrible moment in ‘Narva and Mored’ is a single image which bubbles up in the seething flow of description for four lines, and then vanishes again without trace or explanation:

… Where the pale children of the feeble sun

In search of gold through every climate run,

From burning heat to freezing torments go

And live in all vicissitudes of woe …

But it is only in the last of the Rowley poems, ‘The Excelente Balade of Charitie’, that Chatterton seems to have produced a total equivalent of his condition, a complete symbolic enactment of his hopes and terrors. There is a superb equity in the fact that it was only Thomas Rowley, his double, his other self across three centuries, who could provide him with the material, the stance, and the final distancing to accomplish this most measured and beautiful and poignant of his works. The measuredness is particularly important. None of Chatterton’s subsequent critics or biographers seems to have realized just how unbalanced, how thoroughly peculiar Chatterton became in those first few weeks alone. The first two letters home are amusingly carried off, and reveal exactly the pride and rather disarming boastfulness one might have expected from him. The note is aptly struck in: ‘I get four guineas a month by one Magazine: shall engage to write a History of England, and other pieces, which will more than double that sum … I am quite familiar at the Chapter Coffee-House, and know all the geniuses there. A character is now unnecessary; an author carries his character in his pen.’ (That last remark is an interesting side-light on his use of personae at Bristol.)

But by the letter of May 14th, a kind of glittering wildness is coming over him: ‘Miss Rumsey, if she comes to London, would do well as an old acquaintance, to send me her address. – London is not Bristol. – We may patrole the town for a day, without raising one whisper, or nod of scandal. – If she refuses, the curse of all antiquated virgins light on her: may she be refused when she shall request! Miss Rumsey will tell Miss Baker, and Miss Baker will tell Miss Porter, that Miss Porter’s favoured humble, though but a young man, is a very old lover; and in the eight-and-fiftieth year of his age: but that, as Lappet says, is the flower of a man’s days; and when a lady can’t get a young husband, she must put up with an old bedfellow. I left Miss Singer, I am sorry to say it, in a very bad way; that is, in a way to be married. – But mum – Ask Miss Suky Webb the rest; if she knows, she’ll tell ye. – I beg her pardon for revealing the secret; but when the knot is fastened, she shall know how I came by it – Miss Thatcher may depend upon it, that, if I am not in love with her, I am in love with nobody else …’ And so on for another page or so, with Miss Love, Miss Cotton, Miss Broughton and Miss Watkins. It is still amusing stuff, but his imagination seems over-stimulated, the jokes and innuendoes and declarations spin out with a sort of exalted panic. It is also clear that he is very lonely, and he desperately hopes that Miss Rumsey will be coming to the city. A paragraph in the next letter, to his sister dated May 30th, ends with: ‘Humbly thanking Miss Rumsey for her complimentary expression, I cannot think it satisfactory. Does she, or does she not, intend coming to London? Mrs O’Coffin has not yet got a place; but there is not the least doubt but she will in a little time.’ The letter finished with a scrawled PS: ‘I am at this moment pierced through the heart by the black eye of a young lady, driving along in a hackney-coach – I am quite in love: If my love lasts ‘till that time, you shall hear of it in my next.’ It is throw-away, but rather revealing.

In these letters there is only one reference to Rowley (though several to St Mary Redcliff). It is an odd one. It shows that Rowley was on his mind, but it appears to be bidding him farewell as a companion. ‘As to Mr Barrett, Mr Catcott, Mr Burgum, &c., they rate literary lumber so low, that I believe an author, in their estimation, must be poor indeed! But here matters are otherwise; had Rowley been a Londoner, instead of Bristowyan, I could have lived by copying his works.’ In his characteristically ambiguous manner, Chatterton appears to be wondering if Rowley could in fact be turned into a Londoner: whether Rowley could survive outside the environment of medieval Bristol which created him, and could perhaps expand into more universal themes that would move far beyond the old localized settings. This is exactly what ‘The Balade of Charitie’ did do: there is no other Rowley poem with a more timeless setting and theme, and no other Rowley poem which has so finely absorbed the humane and observant style of Chaucer. The idea was to mature until July; a powerful island of calm amid Chatterton’s turmoil and uncertainty and distress.

Some time in June Chatterton left Shoreditch, and moved to the cheaper and seedier area of Holborn. He took an attic room in the second house along Brooke Street from the High Holborn end. It was an area of disrepute. Labourers from Ireland, criminals and prostitutes lived there. It was the home of the Cato Street conspiracy. Clergymen when they visited their flock in these streets were accompanied by bodyguards. Chatterton’s landlady was a Mrs Angel, a dressmaker. Dressmaking in that area was often synonymous with brothel keeping. Round the corner in Fox Court was where Richard Savage was born. Mr Cross kept his chemist shop on the corner. Even nowadays, with the pink neo-gothic edifice of the Prudential Insurance Building looming respectably along the right-hand side of the road, it is not a comforting street to be in. You cannot see enough sky.