B007P4V3G4 EBOK (30 page)

Ah, you already know the tale? You do not care for tittle-tattle.
You are a serious young man. Oh.

I have known marchionesses as old as the hills who were more
amusing than you. Of course they didn't look like the Apollo
Belvedere. I have been able to admire your thighs from all sides
now. They are divine but not for sale, no doubt, so don't lead this
old rag-and-bone man into temptation and please sit down, on one
of those hundreds of chairs here. There. And now tell me frankly
to what I do owe the honour of your visit.

Chatterton?

Chatterton.

Our countries are at war. No ship can cross the Channel. Letters
are being intercepted and copied out by your cabinet noir or
whatever it's called in these bloody times. Chit-chat, on the
contrary, is still as free as the wind. Chatterton - tsk-tsk-tsk. A
jungle full of monkeys is what you hear gabbling in that name.
You disappoint me. Moreover, you're not au courant at all. Here in
England, we ran out of things to say about Chatterton ten years
ago.

But you haven't ...

Not by a long chalk ...

Well, well: you don't half know how to use your tongue! Go
on, sock it to me! My my, a chiasmus, just like that: 'le martyre
perpetuel et la perpetuelle immolation' - that's a chiasmus: anyone else
would first have to chew down an entire pen for that. And those
antitheses of yours, just like flints: sparks fly. Go on, bawl me out.
Your rhetoric is amazing: Madame de Choiseul couldn't have
wished for a more talented parrot. It's as if you're reading it all out
loud to me. Such irony! Brilliant, razor-sharp, just like that guillotine
of yours. Beg pardon: guillotine of theirs. I first thought you were
an officer but words are what you set a-marching - you are a poet.
There: an alexandrine escapes you, just like that - take care that
you don't begin to rhyme spontaneously. Went to school at the
Jesuits', did you? Pity it's such tosh you put into words so splendidly.

No, just put that back where it came from, that dress-sword.
Tosh: I hold to that. A scorpion is what you just called him, the
former boy? Imprisoned in a circle of fiery coals heaped upon him
by the malevolent bourgeoisie? He seeks a way out, does not find
it, and in despair he stabs himself to death. An affecting image of
the imperilled poet-of-genius, I admit. Except that scorpions cannot
sting themselves to death: that's superstition. Hallowed by being
copied out and parroted for centuries, but no less superstition for
that. It can do no harm to delve in the Great Book of Nature from
time to time - for a poet, too, this can do no harm.

Ah, your scorpion comes from a poetic bestiary. A creature of
fable, just like the basilisk and the griffon. In that case, I'm sure you
will forgive me that I won't take that Chatterton of yours quite
literally either.

A tale of monkeys and parrots after all! For, heavens above,
how they have patched up that little urchin in the Valhalla of tittletattle. Changed beyond recognition is what he is. You were on
about his 'profil d'un jeune Lacedemonien'. Ever seen him? A portrait?
Certainly, there are portraits of him, as there are of the unicorn and
of the archangel Gabriel. I myself have never been allowed to
behold him, but those who did know him, this I do know, they are
agreed that here on earth he had a round, childish forehead and a
pug-nose. His eyes weren't 'noirs', they were grey, and as to the
'tres grands, fixes' and, what was it you said again? - ah, yes,
'percants, that's quite a nice description of his right eye, but not of his left. To put it mildly, his face had something unbalanced about
it. Then you ascribe to this lad of seventeen an appearance you call
'militaire et ecclesiastique'. What must I imagine at that? Are you
saying that he looked like an almoner? He walked hunched over
and went dressed in tatters, in rags that had known broader backs
and stronger legs. A dressed-up monkey is what he was, nothing
else.

Best not feed a songster too much? Ho-ho! Who said that - did
I say that? Poverty as the poet's capital? Again those winged
words are mine? Truly it gives me great satisfaction that, via
the recycling process of gibberish, something witty comes flowing back to me for once. Harsh it may be, but witty too! That I
might be granted to make myself laugh even in my dotage,
imagine ...! The fruits of my ill repute are not all bitter, after all.
Permit me ...

I will have you sent away by my Swiss manservant if you won't
allow me to tell you what precisely my involvement was in this
phantasmagoria. Yes, do start stalking the room, by all means. Make
the floor boom beneath your Werther boots, do. The porcelain
quivers before you. As you're walking about anyway, perhaps you
might take down those four volumes from the bookcase for me,
second shelf from the top? The ones stamped with Chattertoniana, of
course. Thank you. As you can see, I have collected all the hogwash.
And annotated it. Not that my finicky scrawl can effect much against
such bold print. But a monkey is not complete without its fleas.

Chatter-chatter-Chatterton. That I would have driven this jokefigure of yours, this toddler-on-stilts, to suicide through my neglect,
no, through my haughtiness - haughtiness is what you said -
that's not just an invention, it is a libel. That's a lie which, for more
than twenty-five years, has marred my life, me, an innocent. In
you, already the second generation of pen-maulers announces itself
to venerate this pitiable mite as its martyr and patron saint, and
ascribes a gruesome act to me which I have never committed.
Never could have committed. As I said earlier: I never met the
wonderboy. I can only feel involved in this affair with great
difficulty, and only very obliquely at that. If I have been the angel
of death to him, then he has allowed himself to be cut down by .. .

By a loose feather. Now listen carefully. That the boy had taken
his own life I only learned in '71, at the annual banquet of the
Royal Academy in London. This always takes place in April: he
had already been dead 6 months, therefore. Oliver Goldsmith ...

Oliver Goldsmith, that glassy Irish potato, that inspired fool, the
penman surgeon ...

Goldsmith tapped the edge of his plate. Important news! And he
told with grave aplomb how recently a chest full of old manuscripts
had been found in Bristol, in the church of St Mary Redcliffe. Not
full of bills or deeds, no, belles lettres: chronicles, poems, verse
dramas, all written by a fifteenth century monk called Thomas
Rowley. We - Reynolds, Johnson, etcetera .. .

Just you imagine the other gentlemen as cauliflowers, turnips,
beets - what odds ...

We laughed at the good doctor to his face. He had to be the
last man in London who did not know that these manuscripts were
fakes. That, out into the world from within the darkness of
Rowley's cowl, it was the snotty nose of Thomas Chatterton
that...

Don't touch that bell, if you please! It's a real Benvenuto Cellini
- that's what I was told when I bought it, in any case. Oh, do sit
down, please!

So, we laughed scornfully at Goldsmith, to his glassy face, and I
recalled, and this I told the company at the time, too, that I could
have gladdened the literature-loving world earlier with that particular damp squib. In '69, let me look it up for you - March 27th,
1769, I had received a note from a Thomas Chatterton, in those
days an attorney's apprentice in Bristol. He wrote to me that he
had old documents in his possession which might interest me.
From these, it would become clear that painting in oils was already
being practised here in this country in the twelfth century, and this
by an Augustinian abbot from his home city. Were I to tell you
now that a short while previously I had held forth in print that Jan
van Eyck could not be the inventor of that particular art, then you
would understand that I was highly delighted with this news. I
took the bait, I believed the boy, and that is the only injustice I
ever did him. Fraudsters are flatterers, and I was flattered. I wrote
him an encouraging reply in return. Only afterwards did I consult
experts, my friend William

Mason, an eminent scholar, take it from me, and others, and
they made it plain to me that I was dealing with a trickster. The
transcripts of a number of documents he had sent me had been
couched in a macaronic kind of language quite as mediaeval as this
house of mine. The cumbrous spellings, the consistently barbarous
idiom: these were the unmistakable hallmarks of falsification, so I was assured, the way the ever-present signature and the neverabsent craquelure are on a painting. That was when I terminated
the acquaintance. That's all. Nothing more was transacted between
us.

I recounted these facts during that banquet as well, and curiously
enough only silence emanated from that otherwise so lively company. It was there that, for the first time, I got the feeling I have
had ever since when Chatterton is mentioned - that without
wishing to do so, I was defending myself, no matter what I said. A
dull atmosphere prevailed, one of which I understood nothing at
all, until someone remarked: 'And now that poor rascal's dead.'
Then it was my turn to be the one who was the last man in
London, the last one to hear that. Even Goldsmith knew. Thus I
heard for the first time, too, of his mad pride and ambition. That,
after my letter - nobody said it, but it thundered in my ears -
because of my letter he had seen all of London lying at his feet. I
heard the whole incredible story that would be ludicrous had not
death, that great big bully, been haunting it - of the laurel wreaths
which failed of fall down from heaven when he had come to
London posthaste; of the bread the baker did not want to supply
him with at no charge, in awe of his genius; of lifelong disappointment and lack of recognition having driven this seventeen-year-old
to suicide.

In each of these defamatory pamphlets, almost a hundred in
number, it is painted in the most garish colours what happened
that early morning in August, in that slum where I have never set
foot but nevertheless turn out to have been to, after all. How the
seamstress from whom he had rented an attic room had clambered
up the five steep staircases, rasping breath and cursing sotto voce.
All made up, it is, but right down to my dreams I hear her step,
the wheezing of her lungs, I hear her cry: 'Master Chatterton!
Master Chatterton!' and bang against the door which shall never
be opened by him again. I can even hear her fall silent and, in two
minds, hesitate, and I don't need to fetch a locksmith to see that he
is lying dead on his bed. His face is ashen but he smiles and
indeed, you all are quite right, he is beautiful. The attic window,
overlooking the city, is half-open and across his temple and his
cheek falls the glancing light of his mendacious glory, already
dawning above the roofs of London. His dead hand is clenched
around a crumpled piece of paper, on the floor lies a broken
ampoule, scraps of paper everywhere, and on the table beside his bed a burning candle stands smoking. My wet finger doused that
candle prematurely. How dare I deny that?

Only the facts, the poor reviled facts, are the ones whence I
derive my audacity. In one of these little volumes you will find my
Letter to the Editor of Chatterton's Miscellanies where I published
them. Chatterton was said to have done himself in with opium,
hence the smile playing round his dead lips. Poets very much like
to have their corpses smile; they like to smuggle a bit of life into
death. I will not maintain that he did not eat opium - remnants of
the stuff were prised from his teeth by the coroner, for that matter
- but for a felo-de-se something more potent is required: arsenic,
let's say, or vitriol. I plump for the fact that he drank from the
vitriol with which he was trying to cure himself, for this boy of
not yet eighteen years had already had such intimate knowledge of
so many little seamstresses that he was quite squishy with the pox.
I don't wish to deny him his glorified body, but when he was lying
there, dead, he had a face like a wrung-out dishcloth - this the
seamstress herself has testified to.

And then to think that, with a little bit of luck, this apparition
might have been a respected soapmaker. Immediately before his
desperate deed he wrote to a school chum in Bristol that he was
planning to say farewell to Parnassus. From now on, he wrote, he
wished to devote himself to the preparation of 'smegma', which is
Greek for soap, so my good friend Mason assures me.

Don't think that the lies of your idolising poetry can do no
harm. Suicide is all the rage nowadays. Every messenger boy and
attorney's apprentice who has ever managed to rhyme two successive lines and has then not been admitted instantly to the pantheon
of the immortals, grabs for poison. They bring it to their lips, at
the crack of dawn, sniffed at by the mist, leaning against the pylon
of a bridge or lying full-length among the peelings in Covent
Garden. And what do these chaps then see approaching them? The
alluring appearance of a pale beauty, a young Lacedaemonian.
They would have bolted I-don't-know-how-quickly had they seen
a prosperous soapmaker in a worsted coat and wearing a palmwood wig, a tricorn, and with a few glasses of port down him.
This little fact alone might have saved scores of lives.

But against such an appetising concoction of lies, the facts are
powerless. Years ago, I wrote a book of objections to Shakespeare's
depiction of Richard the Third. In my innocence, I believed that
my argued evidence might have an effect against the libellous talk of the Bard. Even scholars who knew better did not wish to
believe me. To Chattertonians that book is even a half-admission
of guilt. Why should I seek to whitewash that child murderer?
Because he and I are brothers in crime, of course! Richard is still
the same monster. Yet I have no regrets about my investigations. I
learned something from them: that is, that the lie can be given to
any story granted the necessary keen nose and tenacity. Then I
believed that we must respect the facts of history, because they are
real and because everything that is real deserves respect. Confabulations like your Chatterton-myth force the facts into a malevolent,
subcutaneous existence. Not just the facts of the past, but the
recalcitrant ones of the here-and-now, too, ones which refuse to
drape themselves in accordance with your myth. These then cause
a pain which must be suffered in loneliness, outside of history, by
each human being individually. He who falsifies history sets a long
repetition of doom and failure in train. I am convinced of this still,
but that facts can do something about it, this I no longer believe.
In themselves, they mean nothing. They're loose stones, rubble
without the cement of the personalities which perpetrated them.
When writing my book about Richard the Third, I noticed how
each event from the past, each tradition, becomes incomprehensible
if only you stare at it for long enough, and also how your
objections and doubts become certainties over time and join up to
form a new tissue of lies. Faith is stronger than reason. Clio cannot
do without myths. They are her suitcases on her journey through
time. The straps snap, the locks burst open and the dirty linen
tumbles out. Not to worry! She puts everything back and goes and
sits with her mighty whatyamacallit on the suitcase until the lid
can be closed once again.