POETS Day! William Makepeace Thackeray
Illustration by Rene Sears
I was chatting with a guy from New Jersey yesterday. It was cold and glum in Alabama. He was making fun of me for acting as if temperatures in the thirties were Armageddon-ish and I shook my head and mumbled something like “…wouldn’t last a second around here in August… humidity.”
He showed me an amazing foul weather trick so epoch shaking I might deign to call it a life-hack. “If you are ever bothered by the weather,” he said, “take out your phone, pull up your weather app, and bring up Iowa City, Iowa.” He demonstrated. It was 9° with a blue subscript that read “feels like 7°.”
According to Wikipedia, there are 171,000 people living in the greater Iowa City Metropolitan Area. I don’t know how that’s possible. It’s POETS Day. Look outside. Now look at your phone weather app, type in Iowa City, Iowa, and look outside again. There are 341,000,000 people in this country, and in comparison, no matter what it looked like out that window, 340,829,000 of you just realized what a beautiful day you’ve been blessed with.
It’s Friday afternoon. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Have at it.
First, a little verse.
***
I usually come across one or two odd and interesting facts when looking into the lives of poets for these posts, and want as I might, I can’t shoehorn or wrestle them into sense with even the loosest narrative, and I can get pretty loose. I found two this week while reading up on the life of William Makepeace Thackeray and I like them too much to discard. I don’t know if it’s still an aside when you haven’t begun anything to momentarily distract from, but a couple of quick asides if you… whether you mind or not, I guess.
First, Thackeray’s daughter Minny married Leslie Stephens and the two had a daughter, Laura. Minny died from eclampsia during pregnancy three years later. Leslie would later remarry, taking Julia Duckworth as his wife. The couple’s third child they named Virginia, who would eventually marry Leonard Woolf. Though Thackeray died nineteen years before her birth, he was Virginia Woolf’s step-grandfather, if such a designation exists. At the very least his granddaughter was her stepsister.
The second story is about Thackeray’s mother, Anne Belcher. She fell in love with an officer from a good family, Henry Carmichael-Smyth. For whatever reasons, her grandmother, so Thackeray’s great-grandmother, was having none of it. In what sounds like an episode of Three’s Company, the grandmother told Carmichael-Smyth that Anne didn’t want to see him again, told Anne that Carmichael-Smyth had died, and shipped Anne off to India where she met and married Richmond Thackeray.
If you’ve ever seen a romantic farce, you know what’s coming. The very much alive Henry Carmichael-Smyth was assigned to India where, unknown to Anne, he made friends with Richmond Thackeray. There was an invitation to dinner, and probably some corseted fainting.
Richmond took ill and died when William was four. His mother married Carmichael-Smyth two years after that. Whatever hackneyed playwrighting and meddling untruths involved in entangling stepson and stepfather did nothing to sour the relationship between the two. Henry and William were, by reports, unusually close friends until William’s untimely death.
Interesting.
William Makepeace Thackeray is best known for his great novel Vanity Fair. He was a rival, good natured I understand it, to Dickens, but history has judged. Maybe It’d be better to say that emergent tastes have decided for the time being as tastes are fickle. Brook Allen wrote in the January 2001 issue of The New Criterion (“Sadness balancing wit: Thackeray’s life & works”), “There is a case to be made for Vanity Fair as the best English novel of the nineteenth century, but it does not outweigh, on its own, the riches of Dickens’s output.”
He wasn’t a one trick pony by any means but he was outshone, I suppose lost in the glare.
In the predecessor to Vanity Fair, his practice book, maybe, The Book of Snobs¸ he popularized the word “snob” after its journey from shoemaker to merchant to member of the lower class as his “person who vulgarly apes his social superiors.” We’ve added some looking down and insecurity since.
He’s lauded for his attention to character. The novel was changing and Thackeray was an innovator. I’ve never read an Edwin Muir criticism, but I have read J.V. Cunningham, who quotes Muir in a paragraph after mentioning that Mark Twain “threatened to shoot anyone attempting to find a plot in his narrative of Huckleberry Finn.”
“The distinguished poet and critic, Edwin Muir said: ‘It was Thackaray who first made a clear break with the plot both as a literary and a popular convention’ so that in Vanity Fair ‘All the plot that remains is the series of incidents which widen and diversify the picture, and set the characters in different relations… What we ask [of the incidents] is that they should arise as naturally as possible, that the plot should not appear to be a plot.’ / And again: ‘There is no external framework, no merely mechanical plot; all is character, and all is at the same time action.’ ‘This spontaneous and progressive logic is the real distinguishing feature of the dramatic novel.’
The above gets two asides of its own. First, if you are at all a fan of J.V. Cunningham, Wiseblood Books has a recently release volume, The Complete Essays of J.V. Cunningham, with an introduction by James Matthew Wilson. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, it’s affordable and interesting. Next, I’d never seen the “/” used in a quotation when it wasn’t dividing lines of poetry or song lyrics. In context it looked like it was noting a paragraph break where making an actual break within the paragraph the quote was featured in would look odd. A combination of Google, Grok, and asking around confirmed that. It’s outmoded now, but you may see “I” and “//” more often than “/” in older texts, all marking where a new paragraph begins but not allowed by space. TIL.
Before his literary career, Thackeray spent time at Cambridge, but didn’t do well or finish. He was more interested in drinking, gambling, and theater. His father left him an inheritance of £21,000 to be claimed on his twenty first birthday, so he didn’t worry too much about preparing for the future. Halfway into his twenty first year, the money was gone. The banks his father trusted with the money went under and he’d already gambled and partied away a good bit.
His wife, Isabella, would succumb to insanity. It began as what seemed post-partum depression, but remained and grew more unruly. She locked herself in a bathroom on a crossing to Ireland at one point and threw herself out the window into the sea. Were it not for her dress, apparently a big bright thing easily seen by sailors against the sea, she would have been lost.
Financially and domestically, promise and hope were dashed. The world did not unfold as hoped. He wrote several poems along the same lines as “Ooh La La” by Faces.
The Age Of Wisdom
W. M. Thackeray (1811-1863)Ho, pretty page, with the dimpled chin,
That never has known the Barber’s shear,
All your wish is woman to win,
This is the way that boys begin,—
Wait till you come to Forty Year.Curly gold locks cover foolish brains,
Billing and cooing is all your cheer;
Sighing and singing of midnight strains,
Under Bonnybell’s window panes,—
Wait till you come to Forty Year.Forty times over let Michaelmas pass,
Grizzling hair the brain doth clear—
Then you know a boy is an ass,
Then you know the worth of a lass,
Once you have come to Forty Year.Pledge me round, I bid ye declare,
All good fellows whose beards are gray,
Did not the fairest of the fair
Common grow and wearisome ere
Ever a month was passed away?The reddest lips that ever have kissed,
The brightest eyes that ever have shone,
May pray and whisper, and we not list,
Or look away, and never be missed,
Ere yet ever a month is gone.Gillian’s dead, God rest her bier,
How I loved her twenty years syne!
Marian’s married, but I sit here
Alone and merry at Forty Year,
Dipping my nose in the Gascon wine.
He reacted by working. He never gave up gambling or stopped drinking – indeed, his drinking and gluttony are blamed for his death by stroke at fifty-two – but he found he could be very industrious when called upon. His attitude is reflected in his writing, his characters rarely finding a happy ending, but gaining in experience. At least some. Throughout, he remained a wit and decried claims he was cynical.
In her New Criterion article, Allen notes “It seemed wrong, to him, to pray or to hold God responsible: ‘For specific requests to God are impertinencies I think, and all we should ask from him is to learn to acquiesce.’”
Sorrows of Werther
WERTHER had a love for Charlotte
Such as words could never utter;
Would you know how first he met her?
She was cutting bread and butter.Charlotte was a married lady,
And a moral man was Werther,
And, for all the wealth of Indies,
Would do nothing for to hurt her.So he sighed and pined and ogled,
And his passion boiled and bubbled,
Till he blew his silly brains out,
And no more was by it troubled.Charlotte, having seen his body
Borne before her on a shutter,
Like a well-conducted person,
Went on cutting bread and butter.
In addition to fiction and poetry, Thackeray had a knack for drawing. He published books of illustration, drew caricatures, and illustrated his works and others’ in various magazines he wrote for or edited. He put out a play, wrote travel books about Paris and some pointed critiques of the Irish. Dickens made a minor fortune, to go with his big fortune, by giving lectures. Thackeray followed his example. He was famous and admired – Charlotte Bronte dedicated the second edition of Jane Eyre to him – and always a payment ahead of collapse.
With his step-father, he published newspapers. Allen again: “no one has ever figured out how they raised the cash.” Later in life he’d found Cornhill¸a well-regarded literary magazine, with George Smith. He noted near the end, that if could get two more novels he’d be back where he was financially at twenty one.
His wife never recovered. He was true to her as best as he could be financially and was conscientious that she be as comfortable as he could make her, but he was alone. There were relationships with other women, some romantic, but he never found another partner. Isabella would outlive him by thirty one years.
He had foolish habits, but could be kind, industrious, and brilliant; a ne’er-do-well-meaning guy. It’s hard not to like him. He seemed glad to be here.
On a Very Old Woman
La Motte Fouqué
“Und Du gingst einst, die Myrt’ im Haare.”
And thou wert once a maiden fair,
A blushing virgin warm and young:
With myrtles wreathed in golden hair,
And glossy brow that knew no care—
Upon a bridegroom’s arm you hung.The golden locks are silvered now,
The blushing cheek is pale and wan;
The spring may bloom, the autumn glow,
All’s one—in chimney corner thou
Sitt’st shivering on.—A moment—and thou sink’st to rest!
To wake perhaps an angel blest,
In the bright presence of thy Lord.
Oh, weary is life’s path to all!
Hard is the strife, and light the fall,
But wondrous the reward!
