Longer Views (49 page)

Indeed, it's arguable that—granted the dialogue between them we've already mentioned—one purpose behind both
The Waste Land
and
The Bridge
was to write a poem, or poem series, of the sort for which Thomson's
City of Dreadful Night
was the prototype; if, indeed, that was among the generating complexities of both poems, then certainly, on that front, Crane's is the more successful.

Today, Thomson experts will sometimes talk of his poems “In the Room,” “Insomnia,” “Sunday at Hampstead,” and even his narrative “Waddah and Om-El-Bonain.” But to the vast majority of readers of English poetry, Thomson is (he is even so styled in several card catalogues, to distinguish him from his 18th Century ancestor of the same name, author of
The Seasons
[mentioned already] and
The Castle of Indolence
) the “author of
The City of Dreadful Night
.”

James Thomson was born at Port Glasgow in Renfrewshire, a day or two more than a month before Christmas in 1834. His mother was a deeply, almost fanatically religious Irvingite. During a week of dreadful storms, his father, chief officer aboard the
Eliza Stewart
, suffered a paralytic stroke and was returned to his family an invalid, immobile on his right side, as well as mentally unsound—when James was six. Two years later, James's mother enrolled her eight-year-old son in a boarding school, the Caladonian Asylum—and died a month or so later. His father was far too ill to take care of his sons. (James had, by now, a two-year-old brother and had already lost a two-year-old sister a couple of years before.) So James began the life of a scholarship/charity student at one or another boarding school or military academy over the next handful of years.

An extremely bright young man, by seventeen James was virtually a schoolmaster himself at the Chelsea Military Academy. His nickname from the Barnes family with whom he now lived was “Co”—for “precocious.” At sixteen he'd begun to read Shelley and, shortly after, the early German romantic, Novalis. Soon he was publishing poems regularly in London under the pseudonym “Bysshe Vanolis” (or, more usually, under the initial's “B.V.”). Bysshe was, of course, Shelley's middle name—and the name he was called by his friends. “Vanolis” was an anagram of Thomson's new Germanic enthusiasm.

At eighteen Thomson became officially an assistant army schoolmaster—that
is, a uniformed soldier who taught the children associated with Camp Curragh in the mornings and the younger soldiers themselves in the afternoon.

Novalis—the Latin term for a newly plowed field—was the penname of Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), remembered for a mystical novel about a poet's pursuit of a “blue flower” first seen in a dream,
Heinrich von Ofterdingen
, and an intriguing set of notes and fragments, among them the famous “Monologue,” and the even more famous pronouncement, “Character is Fate”—as well, of course, as such wonderful observations as (in Carlyle's fine translations from his 1829 essay of the young German poet):

To become properly acquainted with a truth we must first have disbelieved it, and disputed against it . . .

Philosophy is properly Home-sickness; the wish to be everywhere at home . . .

The division of Philosopher and Poet is only apparent, and to the disadvantage of both. It is a sign of disease, and of a sickly constitution . . .

There is but one Temple in the World; and that is the Body of Man. Nothing is holier than this high form. Bending before men is a reverence done to this Revelation in the Flesh. We touch Heaven, when we lay our hand on a human body . . .

We are near awakening when we dream that we dream . . .

—and the disturbingly prescient observation quoted by Guy Debord in
The Society of the Spectacle
, “Writings are the thoughts of the State; archives are its memory.”

As well, Novalis wrote a series of poems,
Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night
), that forms one of the most influential series of poems from the exciting ferment of Early German Romanticism.

Trained as an engineer, the twenty-three-year-old von Hardenberg was working as an assayer in the salt mines where his father had worked before him. In the small Saxon mining town, he met and fell in love with a thirteen-year-old girl, Sophie von Kühn. He sued her family for her hand, and was finally accepted—though the marriage was not to take place until she was older. Hardenberg was devoted to his young fiancée. Two and a half years later, on March 17th of 1797, Sophie turned fifteen. But two days later, on the 19th, after two operations on her liver, she died. Not a full month later, on April 14th, Hardenberg's younger brother Erasmus passed away. Now Hardenberg wrote a friend in a letter:

It has grown Evening around me, while I was looking into the red of Morning. My grief is boundless as my love. For three years she has been my hourly
thought. She alone bound me to life, to the country, to my occupation. With her I am parted from all; for now I scarcely have
myself
any more. But it has grown Evening . . .

And in another letter, from May 3rd:

Yesterday I was twenty-five years old. I was in Grünigen and stood beside her grave. It is a friendly spot; enclosed with simple white railing; lies apart, and high. There is still room in it. The village, with its blooming gardens, leans up around the hill; and it is at this point that the eye loses itself in blue distances. I know you would have liked to stand by me, and stick the flowers, my birthday gifts, one by one into her hillock. This time two years, she made me a gay present, with a flag and national cockade on it. To-day her parents gave me the little things which she, still joyfully, had received on her last birthday. Friend,—it continues Evening, and will soon be Night.

Soon after that, Hardenberg composed both his fragments and his
Hymns
.

An early manuscript shows us that Novalis first wrote all six of his hymns as verse. But later he reworked and condensed the first four (and much of the fifth) into a hard, glittering, quintessentially modern German prose-poetry. It was only the final hymn, the sixth, “Sensucht nach dem Tode” (“Yearning for Death”) that Novalis let stand as traditional poetry. The prose-poetry version was the one published by the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel in their magazine
Athenaeum 3
, n. 2, in 1800.

By inverting a traditional metaphor, the
Hymnen
(a series quite as notable in its ways as
The City of Dreadful Night, The Waste Land
, and
The Bridge
, though it lacks the two modern series' urban specificity) introduce an astonishing trope into the galaxy of European—and finally Western—rhetoric: To those of a certain sensibility (often those in deep grief, or those with a secret sorrow not to be named before the public), the day, sunlight, and the images of air and light that usually sign pleasure are actually hateful and abhorrent. Night alone is the time such souls can breathe freely, be their true selves, and come into their own. For them, night is the beautiful, wondrous, and magical time—not the day.

In the second half of that extraordinary fifth Hymn, in which both prose and verse finally combine, Hardenberg even goes so far as to Christianize his “
Nachtbegeisterung
” (“Enthusiasm for the night”): Night, not day, is where the gods dwell as constellations. It was through the night the three kings traveled under their star seeking Jesus, and it was in the night they found Him. Similarly it was during the night that the
stone was rolled away from the tomb and, thus, it was the night that the Resurrection occurred.

Writers who were to take up this trope of the inversion of the traditional values of night and day—in both cases, directly from Novalis—and make it their own include both Poe and Baudelaire. And the great Second Act of Wagner's
Tristan und Isolde
has been called simply “Novalis set to music.” Certainly Thomson's
The City of Dreadful Night
is the poetic moment through which it erupted into the forefront of English poetic awareness. The Christianizing moment makes the trope Novalis's own, but writers were to seize that basic night/day inversion—Byron for Childe Harold and Manfred, Poe for C. August Dupin—till we can almost think of it as
the
romantic emblem.

By comparison to Novalis (or Thomson), Crane's
Bridge
is overwhelmingly a poem of the day—yet it has its crepuscular moments, where one is about to enter into night:

From Crane's opening “
Proem,
” addressing the Bridge:

And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;

Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.

The City's fiery parcels all undone,

Already snow submerges an iron year . . .

Though Crane is the author, this is Novalis (does Crane's capital “C” in “City” consciously link it to Thomson's?)—and Novalis by way of Thomson, at that!

As well, in
The Bridge
, there is the pair of aubades, “The Harbor Dawn” and “Cutty Sark,” when night is being left behind.

But let us linger on the Thomson/Novalis connection a little longer. Eventually it will lead us back to Crane, and by an interesting circumlocution:

Thomson not only took Novalis's pen name and Novalis's famous poetic night/day inversion for his own. Working with another friend, he taught himself German and translated Novalis's
Hymns:
though his translation has never been published in its entirety, the sections reprinted by various biographers are quite lovely; the manuscript has been at the Bodley Head since 1953. Thomson also appropriated, however, a bit of Novalis's biography.

When he was eighteen and an assistant army schoolmaster in Ballincollig near Cork, Thomson met the not quite fourteen-year-old daughter of his friend Charles Bradlaugh's armourer-sergeant, Mathilda Weller, with
whom he was quite taken. They danced together at a young people's party; presumably they had a handful of deep and intense conversations. Two years later, before she reached her sixteenth year, Mathilda died.

In later years, Thomson claimed that her death wholly blighted the remainder of his life. (Mathilda just happened to be the name Novalis had given to the character inspired by Sophie in his novel of the mystical quest for the blue amaranthus in
Heinrich von Ofterdingen
.) On his own death from dipsomania, at age forty-seven in 1882, Thomson was buried with a lock of Mathilda's hair in the coffin with him. But it's quite possible Thomson used this suspiciously Novalis-like fable to excuse the fact that he did not marry, also to excuse his increasing drunkenness, and quite possibly as a cover for promiscuous homosexuality in the alleys and back streets of London, where he eventually finished his life. While Friedrich von Hardenberg survived Sophie von Kühn by only four years—tuberculosis killed him shortly before he turned twenty-nine (as it would kill the twenty-three-year-old Greenberg)—James Thomson survived Mathilda Weller by nearly thirty.

An incident in Thomson's young life that may have come far closer to blighting the remainder of it than Mathilda's death occurred in 1862, however, when Thomson was twenty-seven—and still teaching in the army. Thomson and some other schoolmasters were at a pond. Though it was a private lake and no bathing was allowed, someone dared one among them to swim out to a boat in the middle. Thomson was recognized but, when questioned about the incident later, refused to give the names of his companions. For this, he was demoted to schoolmaster 4th Class, then dismissed from the army.

Whether any of the other schoolmasters involved were dismissed has not been recorded.

Thomson's earliest biographer, Henry Salt, makes little of the incident and claims Thomson was not guilty of any personal misconduct but was simply unlucky enough to be part of “the incriminated party.”

But Thomson's 1965 biographer, William David Schaefer, feels the explanation is wildly improbable, detecting about it some sort of Victorian cover up—possibly involving alcoholism: Thomson's drinking had already established itself as a problem as far back as 1855. Perhaps the young men at the pond were both rowdy and soused. I would go Schaefer one further, however, and suggest there was some sort of sexual misconduct involved as well, for which the swimming incident was, indeed, used as the official excuse to expel the group of possibly embarrassing fellows. But we do not know for sure.

What we do know is that Thomson now went to London and began a career of writing scathingly radical articles for the various political
journals of the times—often living off his friends, and drinking more and more. And it was only now that (some of) his poems began to refer to a secret sorrow—presumably Mathilda Weller's death. In London Thomson lived with his friend Charles Bradlaugh (and Bradlaugh's wife and two daughters) on and off for more than twelve years as a kind of tolerated, even fondly approved of, if occasionally drunken, uncle—until a year or so after
The City of Dreadful Night
was published in the March and May issues of Bradlaugh's magazine,
The National Reformer
. (Bradlaugh skipped the April issue because of objections from readers; but still other readers, among them Bertram Dobell, wrote to ask when the poem would continue; and publication resumed.) But with Thomson's newfound fame, the poet-journalist's drinking escalated violently—and the two men finally broke over it.

The City of Dreadful Night
begins with two Italian epigraphs, one by Dante, one by Leopardi. The Dante says, “
Per me si va nella citta dolente
” (“Through me you enter into the sorrowful city.”) But this is not the all too familiar motto over the Gate of Hell. Rather, from Thomson's poem, we realize this is Thomson's motto for the gate of birth and that the city of life itself is, for Thomson, the sorrowful city, the city without hope or love or faith. And Leopardi is, after all, the poet who wrote to his sister Paolina about the grandeur that was Rome: “These huge buildings and interminable streets are just so many spaces thrown between men, instead of being spaces that contain men.”
The City of Dreadful Night
is a blunt and powerful, if not the most artful, presentation of the condition of humanity bereft of all the consolations of Christianity as well as the community of small rural settlements—next to which
The Waste Land
, with its incursions of medieval myth, occultism, and Eastern religions to provide a possible code of meaning and conduct, looks positively optimistic!