Childish Loves, by Benjamin Markovits

Childish Loves is the third book concerning George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) by Benjamin Markovits.  The first two books – Imposture (2007) and A Quiet Adjustment (2008) – are fairly straightforward historical novels.  The first in the series focuses on Byron and his relationship with John Polidori (author of the one of the first vampire stories in the English language), while the features Annabella Milbanke, who later became Lady Byron.

But Childish Loves tries for something different.  In this novel, Markovits recounts how the previous two volumes are really the work of the late Peter Pattieson (born Peter Sullivan), a teacher at a New York private school.  In the prologue to Imposture, Pattieson/Sullivan was the supposed owner of the Polidori manuscript we subsequently read.  In Childish Loves, its revealed that Pattieson/Sullivan died following a scandal involving one of his students, leaving author Markovits three manuscripts: the novels Imposture and A Quiet Adjustment and three components that make up this book.  It is the conceit of this final novel that Markovits has been merely the editor and literary midwife of these Byronic fictions.

Markovits likes to play the contemporary game of metafiction to a fault.  He narrates this novel in his own voice, including details on possible marital trouble with wife “Caroline” (the book is dedicated to Caroline, and a quick Internet check confirms that this is his wife), while also complaining of mid-career malaise.  He also includes huge swaths to seemingly true autobiography (his past as a basketball player, for example, as well as time spent both in Texas and abroad).  However, it would seem that Pattieson/Sullivan are made up of whole cloth, invented just as much as the passages “by” Lord Byron.

All of this, of course, is the game Markovits is playing.  In this novel, “Markovits” (whether the “real” or “fictional” one) complains at length that the only thing readers wanted to know about his earlier Byron novels were what parts were “true.”  This dual game Childish Loves allows Markovits to explain where his historical fiction departed from fact, while teasing the reader with doubts about the “real” Markovits. 

If all of this sounds beguiling or intriguing, it is … to a degree.  Markovits errs in thinking that people really care to any extent on the historicity of historical fiction – they don’t.  People want a good story, and if the prose is beautiful or evocative as well, all the better.  Everyone expects romanticism in historical fiction, just they expect hyperbole and exaggeration in autobiography, or a closely-structured argument to drive straight history.  Anything written without a particular point of view rapidly becomes unreadable.

Sadly, the Byron of Markovits’ imagination (or that of Pattieson/Sullivan, if you wish to play that particular game) is never compelling or beguiling.  Byron was a man of extreme intelligence, remarkable charisma, great poetic ability and violent passions.  The Byron in these imagined passages is merely an empty-headed spoiled rich kid with murky political ideals – a Brat Packer trying to raise an army.  As such, he never comes to life nor convinces.

Fortunately, Markovits equips his novel with a strong narrative hook: Markovits travels across the country meeting various friends and relatives of the late Pattieson/Sullivan, trying to learn how much of the writer’s personal life bled into his Byronic fictions.  It is much like The Aspern Papers heavily diluted with contemporary angst. 

One plows through Childish Loves waiting for the moment when the novel works better and lives up to it abundant potential, but that moment never seems to come.  There are moments and premises here that seem ripe for more satisfying exploration, but the final taste is one of disappointment.

Cromwell Before the Coffin of Charles I, By Paul Delaroche (1831)

We close this weeklong look at the pictures of Paul Delaroche with a scene that happened (at last!) after an execution.  Here is Oliver Cromwell gazing at the body of his nemesis, Charles I.

As we remember from yesterday’s picture, Strafford Led to Execution, we know that Charles was a hard-headed practitioner of real politik, who did not hesitate to cast longtime friends to the wolves in the name of political expediency.  Charles fought the armies of the English and Scottish parliaments in the English Civil War. He was defeated in 1645, and surrendered to a Scottish force that handed him over to the English Parliament.  Charles refused to accede to demands for a constitutional monarchy, and escaped in 1647.  He was re-imprisoned on the Isle of Wight, where he forged an alliance with Scotland.  However, Oliver Cromwell had control over England by 1648, and then Charles was tried, convicted and executed for high treason in 1649.  The monarchy was abolished and the Commonwealth of England began (lasting a scant year, when the monarchy was restored to Charles’ son, Charles II). 

It’s important to remember that Delaroche was among the most popular and highest paid painters of his generation.  It was a generation that brooded upon the French Revolution decades earlier, and had lost much of its optimism.  Instead, Delaroche had a particular affinity for history’s victims.  One critic claimed he specifically chose subjects “that attack the nervous system of the public.”

Delaroche regularly synthesized French history through the prism of English history; and after the defeat of Waterloo there was a great interest in English history in France, and in the works of Walter Scott, Shakespeare and Byron.  Delaroche was drawn to the Civil War, which he saw as a forerunner of the French Revolution, where he cast Charles as a proto-Louis XVI and Cromwell as a less-dapper Napoleon.

Delaroche paints Cromwell Before the Coffin of Charles I with the Lord Protector—“brutal as fact” in the words of the poet Heinrich Heine—standing over the body of his defeated enemy. Though Delaroche would deny any specific connection, it is impossible not to interpret this work as a comment on recent French history.

Delaroche does not trust this man; preparatory drawing of Cromwell

Ever theatrical, Delaroche paints a tableaux.  We witness the horrible crimes of history, and watch the victors and victims saddled with their aftermath.  For greater verisimilitude, Delaroche built little stage sets, including plaster model figures, to help his artistic imagination.  More important, he never let actual history get in the way of a good story – in fact, the scene depicted above is apocryphal.  There is no record of Cromwell gazing at the corpse of his vanquished enemy, but Delaroche had heard the story and knew it contained all the artistic truth his history needed.

The important thing is that Delaroche always gets the big picture right: pity the suffering, despise the powerful and corrupt, and be deeply suspicious of the mob. 

The Cromwell of today’s picture does not seem to be the hero of English parliamentary law, but, rather, yet another politician ensuring that a powerful enemy was out of the way.  One hand rests by the hilt of his sword, the other holds open the coffin.  The tiled floor suggests, to me, a chessboard, and Cromwell has certainly outmaneuvered the King.  There is deep satisfaction on his face, but what does he look at so intently?

Look closely at the corpse of the dead monarch, and you will see the bloody stiches around the dead man’s neck, where the king’s head had been sewn back on the corpse.  Nor is the dead man attired in kingly robes befitting his office, but a simple shroud of white, no different from that wrapping any dead commoner.  He does not lie in state, but his simple coffin is propped on a chair.

I do not think Delaroche believed Charles to be a good man (or monarch); in fact, his sympathetic painting of Thomas Wentworth before execution, a mean and deadly trick Charles played on a key ally, makes that fairly plain.  But, neither, does Cromwell seem to capture the painter’s admiration.

In fact, after painting so many history pictures with executions, betrayals and excess of power, I believe Paul Delaroche knew politicians for what they are.

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, By Peter Ackroyd

His was the most beautiful corpse I had ever seen.  It seemed that the flush had not left the cheeks, and that the mouth was curved in the semblance of a smile.  There was no expression of sadness or of horror upon the face but, rather, one of sublime resignation.  The body itself was muscular and firmly knit; the phthisis had removed any trace of superfluous fat, and the chest, abdomen and thighs were perfectly formed.  The legs were fine and muscular, the arms most elegantly proportioned.  The hair was full and thick, curling at the back and sides, and I noticed that there was a small scar above the left eyebrow.  That was the only defect I could find.

Well, there’s a dainty dish for Halloween day, served up by novelist Peter Ackroyd (born 1949).  Ackroyd is one of our most celebrated novelists and essayists.  His gathered criticism, The Collection: Journalism, Reviews, Essays, Short Stories, Lectures (2001), reflects a lively and opinionated intelligence; these little gems are among the finest things he’s written.

Ackroyd’s biographies are justly famous, and his monumental Dickens (1990) may be the last word on the subject.  Written in the manner of a Victorian novel, Dickens demonstrates the importance of form matched to content.  He has also produced excellent biographies of Turner (2005), Blake (1995) and Thomas More (1998).

Most of his novels are equally distinguished, especially to this reader The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983) and our subject today, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008).  Readers expecting the usual hugger-mugger of less accomplished supernatural novelists, turn elsewhere.  But … if you are interested in a novel of ideas that is equal parts chiller and historical novel, then this book is for you.

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein is a wonderful mix of fact and fancy.  Ackroyd’s conceit is that Victor Frankenstein himself was a friend of Percy and Mary Shelley, and was there for that storm-driven evening in Switzerland when the Shelleys, Lord Byron and Dr. John Polidori sat around, telling ghost stories.  That evening led Mary, then 18 years old, to later write the novel Frankenstein (1818).

The novel includes a great deal of actual historical incident (Shelley sent down from school, the drowning death of his first wife, Byron’s friendship with Polidori), while skillfully inserting into it the story of Frankenstein and his monster.  But, more than anything, what Ackroyd is playing with is the Romantic novel of ideas, and the notion that Olympian notions of transcendence and heightened sensibility can be very dangerous things.  Frankenstein – himself neither poet nor artist and, perhaps, an indifferent scientist – dreams of lofty achievement and elevated sensations.  Does that drive him to commit horrible acts … or, worse yet, to create life in a mad ambition to usurp the powers of God, and then refuse responsibility for the life he has created?

More importantly, does Frankenstein’s Monster truly exist, or is it an extension of his own fears, evil ambitions, or, perhaps, a suppressed homosexual desire for Percy Shelley?

Like Dracula, the “meaning” of the Frankenstein Monster has altered with each decade since first created by Mary Shelley – the book can be interpreted as everything from a female-free reproductive paradigm to a socialist tract.  If succeeding generations have grappled with the overarching meaning of the Monster, why should Victor Frankenstein himself be exempt?

Ackroy’ds Monster – like that of Mary Shelley – is no mute, shambling zombie, but, rather, an articulate and vengeful revenant.  He did not ask to be brought into this world and, cannot understand human cruelty and apathy.  Eventually, like Milton’s Satan, he believes that it is perhaps better to do evil than to do nothing at all.  That, perhaps more than anything else, is the true meaning of Halloween.

Here’s another snippet, where the Monster confronts Frankenstein after murdering Shelley’s first wife, Harriet:

“I wished you to notice me.”

“What?”

“I wished you to think of me.  To consider my plight.”

“By killing Harriet?”

“I knew then that you would not be able to throw me off.  To disdain me.”

“Have you no conscience?”

“I have heard the word.”  He smiled, or what I took to be a smile passed across his face.  “I have heard many words for which I do not feel the sentiment here.”  He tapped his breast.  “But you understand that, do you not, sir?”

“I cannot understand anything so devoid of principle, so utterly malicious.”

“Oh, surely you have some inkling?  I am hardly unknown to you.”  I realized then that that his was the voice of youth – of the youth he had once been – and that a cause of horror lay in the disparity between the mellifluous expression and the distorted appearance of the creature.  “You have not lost your memory, I trust?”

“I wish to God I had.”

“God?  That is another word I have heard. Are you my God?”

I must have given an expression of disdain, or disgust, because he gave out a howl of anguish in a manner very different from the way he had conversed.  With one sudden movement he picked up the great oaken table, lying damaged upon the floor, and set it upright.  “You will remember this.  This was my cradle, was it not?  Here was I rocked.  Or will you pretend that the river gave me birth?”  He took a step towards me.  “You were the first thing that I saw upon this earth.  Is it any wonder that your form is more real to me than that of any other living creature?”

I turned away, in disgust at myself for having created this being.  But he misunderstood my movement.  He sprang in front of me, with a celerity unparalleled.  “You cannot leave me.  You cannot shut out my words, however distasteful they may be to you.  Were you covered by oceans, or buried in mountains, you would still hear me.”

We hear him still, nearly 200 years after his conception.  Frankenstein’s Monster is that which in each of us is both abject and terrible.

Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard Part IV: Don Juan and the Statue of the Commander

I had thought of ending the week with another example of the Neoclassicism of Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard (1780-1850), but when I came upon this, I could not resist.

My readers are doubtless familiar with the story of Don Juan, the well-known libertine.  There are countless versions of the story, from Moliere and Corneille to Mozart and Byron.  The painter Eugene Delacroix (1798 – 1863) was particularly taken with Mozart’s opera, writing “What a masterpiece of romanticism!  And that in 1785!  … the entry of the specter will always strike a man of imagination.”

Delacroix was writing of the finale, where the ghost of one of the Don’s victims comes to escort the libertine to hell.  This picture looks so unlike most of Alexandre-Évariste’s oeuvre that I cannot but help but think it had some special significance for the artist.  It’s a little picture, no more than 16x13, and hardly on the scale of his deliberately executed Neoclassical masterpieces.  The brush strokes are clearly visible, and it is painted with a loose vitality that has more in common with the Impressionism that was still decades away than the Neoclassical ideal it would eventually shun.

Don Juan here is clearly heroic: with his athletic stance, burning torch and pointed beard and mustaches, he looks more like a figure from a swashbuckling novel than a dissipated roué.  His torch illuminates two ghostly female figures … other victims, or fellow neighbors in hell?  In most of the artist’s pictures, the figure of the Commander would be depicted in finicky detail, each chink and join of armor would be visible, along with showy touches, such as light reflected upon the metal.  Not here – the ghostly figure is suggested by some thickly painted brush strokes, the face no more than a few well-placed shadows. 

That this moment in the Don Juan story held some kind of import for Alexandre-Évariste is evident – he painted it more than once.  Why, I wonder?  It does not take an armchair Freud to see that the Commander is clearly a father figure.  Did Alexandre-Évariste have regrets about the way he treated his father?  Not only did he burn Papa Fragonard’s drawings, but he seems to have sat idly by while the old man was destitute (living by the good graces of another Neoclassicist, David.)  I can’t help but think that this picture is clearly tied to the artist’s psyche.  He paints Don Juan handsome and athletic – certainly the way that most of us see ourselves, despite what our mirrors tell us.  But this heroic figure is still undone by the physical, patriarchal figure of his past sins.  It does not seem to stretch the imagination too much to think that the events may be operatic, but the thoughts are autobiographical. 

If the picture was prophetic – that there is a hell and poor Alexandre-Évariste is indeed roasting marshmallows with other artistic villains like Cellini and Caravaggio – one can hope that he still has access to paint and canvas.  Work like this would merit a trip to the lower regions, if only for a visit.