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I like John Fuller. I like the Audenesque, Robert-Gravesy, flavour of his poetry, its deft attentiveness to traditional forms, its poise and expressiveness. And I like his off-kilter novels too, or at any rate the two I've read (especially
Flying to Nowhere which is one of the more interesting midrashes on
Frankenstein. Sort-of). But I'm still trying to work out what I think about his 2006 dramatic monologue ‘Coleridge in Stowey’, and the volume (above) in which it takes its place alongside poetic engagements with Matthew Arnold, Brahms, Wallace Stevens and others. The truth is I'm not sure I quite
get it.
The Space of Joy is really eight long poems, linked thematically into a loose whole. First is ‘The Solitary Life’, 35 well-turned sonnets describing a narrator-poet relaxing in a hammock in Vaucluse, thinking of past greats. Here's one:
I think of Petrarch at his lonely farm
Beside the rising of a sacred river,
Believing that an Avignon madame
Was cause enough for love to last for ever.
I think of Wagner's Sachs, to whom the Geist
Of song, its long tradition and survival,
Was something fine for which he sacrificed
All hope of love, and gave it to his rival;
I think of Pope beside the sparkling Thames,
His bed as empty as his heart was full;
Impetuous Coleridge, that guilty youth;
And Arnold's self-deceiving theorems
That proved a mutual trust impossible,
The solitary life a form of truth. [‘4. The Regrets’]
This sonnet strikes the keynote: the disconnections of love and desire, the intermittencies of mutual human affection, the truth in solitude set in implicit contrast to the fictions of romance. After this the volume goes on to 2 and 3 ‘Coleridge in Stowey’ and ‘Arnold in Thun’; two great nineteenth-century poets pondering their lovelorn solitude. 4 is ‘The Rivals’, about Sachs and Beckmesser from Wagner's
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (the poem focuses mostly on poor self-denying Sachs). The fifth poem ‘Brahms in Thun’ evokes the composer's feelings for beautiful Hermine Spies, who went on to marry a lawyer. The brief sixth, ‘The Fifth Marquess’ is, I think, about the wastrel peer
Henry, Lord Paget, and the volume closes with 7: ‘Wallace Stevens at the Clavier’ and 8: ‘Thun 1947’.
The spaces of these bittersweet joys are both the geographical locations in which these various lovelorn misfits find themselves, from Stowey to France, from Thun to Nuremberg—and also the spaces of poetry, the formal shapes and locations: within a sonnet; beneath a tree; inside a book (always inside a book); beside a lake: ‘leaving the lake undisturbed/Flowing on who knows where,/And the lake so beautiful’ muses Fuller's Matthew Arnold, ‘Just as it always was, there’. That there, that
da, is the inevitable situatedness of love. We never love in the abstract, after all. We always love this, or that, concrete particular. Fuller is good on that.
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‘Coleridge in Stowey’ starts with an epigraph from Coleridge's 1803
Notebooks. Kathleen Coburn thinks it a reference to Sara Hutchinson:
Why we two made to be a Joy to each other, should for so many years constitute each other's melancholy — O! but the melancholy is Joy —
Fuller's own note explains ‘the poem purports to be a meditation in winter beginning beneath the lime tree of ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’ (I wrote at some length on Coleridge's famous limey-arborial poem,
here, by the way). Here's Fuller's poem:
Wrestling the challenge of Infinity
To Personality, I sometime heard
The Bride's voice, distant, from her bower,
Less often now. I argue with my self;
Certain, therefore, of half a certainty
Before the mists assert their mistiness
And leave me without a Way.
And now at eve,
Where once beneath a sprawling tent
Of dappled leaves and aromatic keys and flowers
I set my creaking chair's unequal feet [10]
Upon the bulging roots that sank down deep
Into green Somerset for sustenance,
It has become my wintry pleasure here
To find my self not in an obscure wood,
But somehow lost beneath a single tree
That like a cage lowers its naked branches
Towards the icy bareness of the soil.
Truly a prison that the season locks
As a mind is locked by thoughts that put it there!
Unfeeling, inward cogitations, blind [20]
To the light that still streams from a chilly West.
The satisfaction of the solitary
Is to think to be defined by others' thoughts
Concerning him, enjoying their concern,
Relishing misery so long as he
Is made its object, like a Pietà.
The heron has the patience to be patient,
Though there be never a fish in sight.
Would he may not starve! And furthermore
It were unnecessary that the worm [30]
Make friends; and therefore to its social sense
The convivial temper is unknown. I hail
These stoic fellow-creatures in my soul!
Heron, worm and poet share the doom
Of laboring for a scant reward!
Inside
The coals burn thinly on their wretched altar.
The Shadow Folk on walls and ceilings, guardians
Of our quieter Selves that after kettle-quarrels
Settle to nodding by a flickering stove,
Make mocking Panoramas of such battle. [40]
They are our little household gods, masters
Of a moment that undoes all painful knots,
Loosening shapes to fly like smoke and light
And makes our stillness move still, though still, in fancy.
For there is joy upon the cess of words
Spoken in heat, joy in admonishment,
Joy in the melancholy pilgrimage
Our staffs pace out in almost unison
Greater than joy itself.
And here is Hartley,
Little dear Heart, patient philosopher, [50]
His palms clasped to his lips as if to mock
Some grave proposal, not of his usual play
But of a Voyage back to his beginning,
A novel understanding of his place
In the unfixed perplexing scheme of things.
I offer him a piece of cheese, entire.
For the moment that its crumbliness allows,
And gladly he takes it as one who reconciles,
In gracious condescension, the Many with
The One.
Our very first posterity [60]
Is but a small parcel of infinite Joy
Troubled only by the animal spirits
Which went into its making, and our wonder
At the hysteroplast is but a glimpse,
A memory of our own origins,
Grieving with a full heart that such fresh Joy
Will soon become a Melancholia
Like ours.
The woman gives him a bowl of soup
As though he were not mine and certainly
Not hers, but as though my many faults had left him [70]
The better deserving of such charity.
I am to her merely a child, as he is,
Our occupations equal as separate play
In the one chamber.
His cheese falls in the soup,
And I talk with the Shadow Folk to tell them
The Mountains of the Moon are like the veins
In cheese, or embers of a fire, that make
Faces of our present disposition
Out of old satisfactions. And I think
Of him in his first slumbering stillness where [80]
Feeding with ruddy cheek against the moon's
Blue vein-of-a-mountain, the new god's
Baby feet twitched in clouds of linen.
Enthusiastic in his saintliness,
The bridegroom ordered harps, which rendered praise
To him for his forgetting lamps, and now
All that I say is what I know is true,
Though with a bitter voice that may be challenged
As the unspeakable, irrelevant,
To ears that have no need to hear it, and thus [90]
One with the freezing blast that rises now,
Rattling the branches of its cage. O most
Miserable! O vain shadow of shadows!
I have seen the depth of shame, the bride weeping.
I have, outrageously, spoke my own sentence,
And our triangulation, like the new maps
Commissioned by the Ordnance for the War,
Creates a blankness in the living world
That may not be traversed.
All evening
I sit in the parlour in my great-coat like [100]
Satan hiding his wings ....
The risk this poem runs (and which, I think, it manages to avoid) is of concocting a Coleridge persona out of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, a sort of Frankenstein's-creature of orts and scraps of famous Coleridgeanisms. So one context, previously mentioned, is ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’. A second is ‘Frost at Midnight’, in Fuller's Coleridge's address to his infant son Hartley, and in some of the set-dressing (‘the coals burn thinly on their wretched altar’). Plus the peroration to Joy in the middle clearly owes something to ‘Dejection: an Ode’. There are various less obvious references too: the ‘
Mountains of the Moon’ in central Africa were one of the inspirations for ‘Kubla Khan’, according to John Livingstone Lowes. Coleridge did call Hartley ‘dear heart’ and ‘reconciling the Many with the One’ [59-60], or more fancifully arranging the union as Bride and Groom of infinity with Personality [1-2], describes STC's larger creative ambition pretty well. Other elements here that seem to have the smack of Coleridgean pretentiousness are actually pure Fuller: STC never uses the word ‘hysteroplast’ [64] for instance—presumably it means surgical intervention into the uterus, which seems an odd way of referring to a
baby—and neither is ‘cess of words’ a Coleridgean phrase (cessation of words? assessment of words? I'm not sure). But one important context for the poem that does, I think, need unpacking is its references to the ‘cheese entire’.
Fuller is thinking of a remarkable incident from Coleridge's early youth in Ottery St Mary, related in a letter he sent to his friend Thomas Poole (16 October 1797) and worth quoting at length.
I had asked my mother one evening to cut my cheese entire, so that I might toast it: this was no easy matter, it being a crumbly cheese — My mother however did it — / I went into the garden for some thing or other, and in the mean time my Brother Frank minced my cheese, ‘to disappoint the favourite.’ I returned, saw the exploit, and in an agony of passion flew at Frank — he pretended to have been seriously hurt by my blow, flung himself on the ground, and lay there with outstretched limbs — I hung over him moaning and in a great fright — he leaped up , & with a horse laugh gave me a severe blow in the face. — I seized a knife, and was running at him, when my Mother came in & took me by the arm — I expected a flogging — & struggling from her I ran away, to a hill at the bottom of which the Otter flows — about one mile from Ottery. — There I stayed; my rage died away; but my obstinacy vanquished my fears – & taking out a little shilling book which had, at the end, morning & evening prayers, I very devoutly repeated them — thinking at the same time with inward & gloomy satisfaction, how miserable my Mother must be!
It doesn't stop there. Oh no.
I distinctly remember my feelings when I saw a Mr Vaughan pass over the Bridge, at about a furlong's distance — and how I watched the Calves in the fields beyond the river. It grew dark -& I fell asleep — it was towards the latter end of October — & it proved a dreadful stormy night — / I felt the cold in my sleep, and dreamt that I was pulling the blanket over me, & actually pulled over me a dry thorn bush, which lay on the hill — in my sleep I had rolled from the top of the hill to within three yards of the River, which flowed by the unfenced edge of the bottom. — I awoke several times, and finding myself wet & stiff, and cold, closed my eyes again that I might forget it. —— In the mean time my Mother waited about half an hour, expecting my return, when the Sulks had eyaporated — I not returning, she sent into the Church-yard, & round the town — not found! — Several men & all the boys were sent to ramble about & seek me — in vain! My Mother was almost distracted — and at ten o'clock at night I was cry'd by the crier in Ottery, and in two villages near it — with a reward offered for me. — No one went to bed — indeed, I believe, half the town were up all one night! To return to myself — About five in the morning or a little after, I was broad awake; and attempted to get up & walk — but I could not move — I saw the Shepherds & Workmen at a distance — & cryed but so faintly, that it was impossible to hear me 80 yards off —— and there I might have lain & died — for I was now almost given over, the ponds & even the river near which I was lying, having been dragged. — But by good luck Sir Stafford Northcote, who had been out all night, resolved to make one other trial, and came so near that he heard my crying — He carried me in his arms, for near a quarter of a mile; when we met my father & Sir Stafford's Servants. — I remember, & never shall forget, my father's face as he looked upon me while I lay in the servant's arms — so calm, and the tears stealing down his face: for I was the child of his old age. —— My Mother, as you may suppose, was outrageous with joy — in rushed a young Lady, crying out — ‘I hope, you'll whip him, Mrs Coleridge!’ — This woman still lives at Ottery & neither Philosophy or Religion have been able to conquer the antipathy which I feel towards her, whenever I see her. — I was put to bed — & recovered in a day or so — but I was certainly injured — For I was weakly, & subject to the ague for many years after. [Coleridge, Letters 1:351-52]
There's a lot that might be said about this famous episode, beyond goggling at how intensely self-melodramatic and obstinate the young Coleridge was. I mean: bloody hell. But for now I'm interested in what this context says about Fuller's poem.
‘Coleridge in Stowey’ is, in part, about Coleridge's sense of isolation, and therefore about the valences of self-pity. And the cheese incident is a kind of
ne plus ultra of youthful self-pity: the excessive public performance of stubborn self-immolation almost to literal death. But Coleridge has enough insight to be able both to dramatise how ridiculous he was being, and to understand that his self-pity was tangled in with a desire to punish not his brother Frank,
but his mother: feeling profoundly sorry for himself ‘thinking at
the same time with inward gloomy satisfaction, how miserable my Mother must be’. We wound ourselves in order to wound other people, and it is no coincidence, I think, that this whole episode involves a dairy product. Indeed, milk, that metonym of the maternal, also figures as the laming disability that confines Coleridge whilst his friends go off rambling in ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’ (his wife had ‘accidentally’ tipped a skillet of boiling over his foot).
I have to say, I'm not entirely convinced by the first portion of Fuller's poem. Since lime tree boughs and branches grow out and up, ‘sprawling tent’ seems a misdescription (maybe Fuller is thinking of a willow?) and ‘aromatic keys’ just baffles me. Why keys? I see, I suppose, how this relates to the conceit that Coleridge's ‘space’ of melancholy-joy is a kind of prison, and that prison doors I suppose have keys, but I can't relate it to the material object being described. Plus the doublet ‘Truly a prison that the season locks/As a mind is locked by thoughts that put it there!’ throws me out somewhat. It's a sentence without a main verb, so far as I can see, and I can't work out to what the ‘it’, there, refers back. I'm sure this says more about my obtuseness than it does about the poem. And the step-down into plainer speaking captures the point of Coleridge's dialectic of self-pity and other-resentment nicely:
The satisfaction of the solitary
Is to think to be defined by others' thoughts
Concerning him, enjoying their concern,
Relishing misery so long as he
Is made its object, like a Pietà. [22-26]
‘Pietà’ is probably too Roman Catholic an image properly to fit Coleridge's imaginarium. But now I really am nitpicking.
Coleridge styles himself a solitary heron, a worm, an unrewarded poet, and then (line 35) the poem moves inside. The sun, setting in the poem's opening three verse paragraphs, has set, and Coleridge is at his fireside with infant Hartley. ‘The woman’ [68] is presumably Coleridge's wife Sara, but may be a maid; either way that's a stiffly alienating way of referring to a human being, which I suppose is Fuller's point. Coleridge gives his child a piece of ‘cheese entire’, which evokes for the reader his traumatic childhood escapade, quoted above. The woman, whoever she is, feeds the lad soup, into which potage Hartley drops the cheese.
Coleridge tells the lad stories, making up something about the shadow figures cast by the flickering fire, and about the white Mountains of the Moon. The poem compares the distant imaginary saw-tooth of these mountains with the zig-zag pattern of blue-veins in white cheese, which in turn provokes in him a memory of a younger-still Hartley feeding at the blue-veined, lunar white breast of his mother:
in his first slumbering stillness where
Feeding with ruddy cheek against the moon's
Blue vein-of-a-mountain, the new god's
Baby feet twitched in clouds of linen. [80-83]
Though this passage flirts, perhaps, with obliquity, it still strikes me as a beautiful, rather moving image. And I'd say that Fuller handles the self-melodramatising over-reaching of his Coleridge effectively, without allowing the poem itself to tumble into that swamp: the Dantean pretensions of ‘To find my self not in an obscure wood,/But somehow lost beneath a single tree’ [14-15]; the domestic Miltonism of the final line and a half. There's a level, more or less non-negotiable, at which a poem like this works because its collocated images resonate in some way for this reader or that, and possibly they don't for this other: the tree and the fire; the shadows on the wall; the child and the cheese it eats; the white mountain; the white breast; the blank map. It all has ‘to do’, we could say, with Coleridge's tangled-together erotic and maternal disappointments. There is a connection available to others that is not, it seems, available to him. He is marginalised, imprisoned, isolated and alone. How is this a space of joy? In his ‘Dejection’ ode, Coleridge addresses Sara Hutchinson as an avatar of purity:
O pure of heart! thou need'st not ask of me
What this strong music in the soul may be!
What, and wherein it doth exist,
This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist,
This beautiful and beauty-making power.
Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne'er was given,
Save to the pure, and in their purest hour,
Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower,
Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power,
Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower
A new Earth and new Heaven,
Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud— [‘Dejection, an Ode’, 64-70]
The kick is that Coleridge is both those two things: acutely conscious of his prideful stubbornness (and from an early age, as the cheese-tantrum episode illustrates), and sensually as well as spiritually attracted to his ‘Asra’. Fuller spins this Joy in a more compromised manner. Still: it
is a Joy, it seems:
For there is joy upon the cess of words
Spoken in heat, joy in admonishment,
Joy in the melancholy pilgrimage
Our staffs pace out in almost unison
Greater than joy itself. [45-9]
If
cess of words means stopping-speaking, then it's hard to see what kind of joy this made-of-words artefact is proposing; although perhaps the phrase means something like
cess-pit or
sewage of words (though a cesspit is so called because it is enclosed; which is to say,
cess doesn't mean
shit). But I suppose the passage as a whole is saying something like: there
is a kind of joy in those moments when our relationships don't run smoothly, when we fight and shout at one another. And there is a related kind of joy in the mutual estrangement that follows such arguments, as the not-speaking-to-one-another partners plok along the promenade of life, their pilgrim-staffs not quite striking the road at the same time. Can we really call that joy? A flaming row may be cathartic, and make-up sex is famously prized. But the vignette implied here is of a row that leads not to passionate rapprochement but to chilly estrangement, and it's hard to see in what meaningful way we can call that joy. Quite apart from anything else, Fuller's phrasing here, positing as it does a joy
greater than joy itself, just looks self-contradictory.
But maybe that is the point? Space, as the philosophers tell us, is extension and separation, and any joy predicated upon such qualities will tend to remoteness and loneliness. ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’ is a poem about the compensatory joys of the imagination upon which Coleridge draws because he is separated, spatially, from his friends: they're off yomping through the countryside, he's stuck at home, but the point of the poem is (to invoke another poet) that their heard melodies, though sweet, turn out not to be as sweet as Coleridge's unheard ones.
And maybe that's what Fuller is getting at, in this poem and also through the whole of this collection. The pleasures of companionship, of partnership and marriage, of sex and consummation,
are joys; but there is also something joyful in
not getting those things in your life. Joys of not having to compromise with another human being. The complicated satisfactions of melancholy. Self-pity is socially lamentable, even deplorable, but it has the advantage of positioning oneself solidly at the centre of the cosmic stage—it's an illusion, of course, but an illusion that flatters the ego, and therefore one to which the ego can turn a blind eye. Look at young Sam, furious that his cheese entire got minced, on that Devonshire hillside! Sure, he's cold, and miserable, but then again the entire town is searching for him! He's the centre of all attention, the axle around which the entire town turns. Carried homes in the arms of the local nobility, the one woman who suggests he should be punished ignored and despised to this day. That's power. Physical comfort and emotional distress is a small price to pay, one might think.
Is that what Fuller is getting at, in this poem? We feel cast-out, disconnected, unhappy, and we're actually just rather pathetic figures sitting in our parlours in our great-coats (‘you won't feel the benefit’, as my old gran used to admonish us), but we flatter ourselves that we are actually Satans, hiding out wings?
Is that a joy?
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I want, finally, to move from Fuller's poem to some thoughts on Coleridge's hopeless passion for Sara Hutchinson, his ‘Asra’ (which is, in part, what the poem is about).
Some context, in case you don't know the story. So: Coleridge had married Sara Fricker in 1795, but it was very soon apparent that they were poorly matched to one another. My sense is that he was never strongly attracted to, or markedly in love with, his wife, even when they were courting. This was when he was planning
to emigrate to America with Robert Southey and establish a pantisocratic utopia. They both agreed wives/helpmeets would be needful for this enterprise, and when Southey married Edith Fricker, Coleridge rushed into marriage with Edith's sister, Sara. The dreams of Pantisocracy quickly fell apart, leaving Coleridge, married in haste, repenting at leisure.
Before his marriage he had nursed an infatuated passion for a young woman called Mary Evans. Indeed, as he recalled in 1805, looking back more-or-less miserably on his miserable early life, during the early 1790s he endured a ‘Fit of Fears from sex’ and ‘a state of struggling with madness from an incapability of hoping that I should be able to marry Mary Evans (and this strange passion of fervent though wholly imaginary Love uncombinable by my utmost efforts with any regular Hope)’ [
Notebooks 2:2398]. Mary married somebody else. Conceivably Coleridge rushed his proposal to Sara Fricker on the rebound.
Marriage did not settle him, though. Sara was far from stupid, but the two of them had nothing in common intellectually. Of their sex-life Coleridge noted, ruefully, that ‘all [is] as cold & calm as a deep Frost’, complaining that ‘she is uncommonly cold in her feelings of animal Love’ [
Notebooks 1:979]. And the put-upon Sara clearly found her husband really, really
irritating. In 1802 Coleridge wrote to his patron, Josiah Wedgwood, that his wife could furnish ‘an exact and copious Recipe, “How to make a Husband compleatly miserable”’:
Ill-tempered speeches sent after me when I went out of the house, ill-tempered speeches on my return, my friends received with freezing looks, the least opposition or contradiction occasioning screams of passion. [Collected Letters, 2:876]
The detail about not receiving his friends amiably was a recurring grievance for STC. Six years later, when the couple were working out the terms on which they were to separate, he wrote that ‘the one Main Mighty Defect of Female Education’ is that wives are not taught ‘how to receive [a husband] on his Return, how never to recriminate’ and in particular how to avoid the ‘
Mischief of giving pain’ when ‘a Husband comes home from a Party of old Friends, Joyous and full of Heart’ only to be greeted by ‘the love-killing Effect of cold, dry, uninterested looks & Manners’ [
Notebooks, 3:3316]. Why couldn't she enjoy the things
he enjoyed? Why
couldn't she like the people he liked? It was almost as if she was a completely different person to him, with her own tastes and friendships!
There certainly seems to have been something formidable about Sara Coleridge. Elsewhere in the notebooks Coleridge confesses to living in ‘constant dread in my mind respecting Mrs Coleridge's Temper’ [
Notebooks, 2:2398]. Things were going badly, but they were at least going, and the marriage produced three children who survived to adulthood as well-functioning people, so it wasn't a dead loss. But things hit a fatal snag in 1799 when Coleridge met another Sara: Sara Hutchinson, the sister of Wordsworth's wife Mary, who lived with the Wordsworths and helped keep house. Coleridge fell deeply, catastrophically in love with Sara,
‘Asra’ as he called her, but though she was friendly and warm with him she did not love him back. This hopeless unreciprocated passion dominated Coleridge's life for many years.
There's a particularly good essay in Adam Phillips's
Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (2012) called ‘On Not Getting It’. Phillips unpacks the various ways in which we might not ‘get it’, from jokes (‘no one wants to be the person who doesn't get it—doesn't get the joke, doesn't understand what's being said, what's going on’) to our heart's desire. His Phillipsian-Freudian point is that we don't actually understand our heart's desires. We don't understand
why we want what we want, and sometimes we don't even understand
what we want (although we can't help knowing
that we want). Because of this, Phillips thinks our desire has much more to do with what we
don't get than with what we can and do.
I'm not sure I entirely ‘get’ John Fuller's ‘Coleridge at Stowey’ poem (I'm curious, actually: do you?) But saying so is probably not a criticism of the poem itself. Indeed, admitting that I don't ‘get’ Fuller's poem throws the onus on me, rather than Fuller: it sounds much more like a criticism of me and the insufficiency of my readerly faculties than of ‘Coleridge at Stowey’. It's often the case that we don't ‘get’ a poem, and that fact only occasionally correlates to the worth or otherwise of the text. I don't think I really ‘get’ ‘Kubla Khan’ or ‘The Ancient Mariner’ (or Wordsworth's Immortality Ode, or
The Waste Land, or Macbeth's ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow’ speech or ...), and it's exactly the specific quality, the unique eudaimonia of those masterpieces, the stuff that eludes ‘getting’, that's so integral to their greatness. By contrast, I think I mostly
do ‘get’ Coleridge's Conversation poems, which is a way of saying that they are lesser achievements. The love we feel for poetry is not the same as the love we feel for other people of course, but it is still a love, and it is as meaningful to talk about the vectors of desire in an aesthetic as an erotic sense.
‘Getting’ can also mean: ‘begetting’ (Phillips says some fascinating things about the way Desdemona's father Brabantio washes his hands of his daughter after she falls in love with Othello: ‘I had rather to adopt a child than get it’ he declares, which he links to the impossibility of comprehending not only the object but the fact of our children's sexual desire). And ‘getting it’, ‘getting some’, ‘getting lucky’, is a way of referring to sexual intercourse, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, to sexual conquest. Back in 1987 poodle-haired cock-rockers Def Leppard boasted of the copiousness of their sexual relations in their thudding hit single ‘
Armageddon it’. Because if you're a randy young man the only thing more important than ‘getting’ sex is
letting all your friends know that you're getting it. It's a matter, it seems, of world-ending, apocalyptic, armageddon-worthy importance.
Step back two centuries and here's Coleridge recording in his notebook in 1802 the day after the birth of his daughter (also called Sara—so
many Saras!) that his wife Sara had become ‘the Conductor and
thunder-rod of my whole Hatred’ [
Notebooks, 1:1311]. That's a strikingly extreme, almost Armageddon-ish way to refer to one's wife, don't you think? A woman with whom Coleridge was still (as baby Sara's birth proved) having sex. Phillips's Freudianism is much too subtle to stoop to noticing obvious things like clumsy Freudian symbols, but still:
thunder-rod? Really?
‘What I am interested in,’ says Phillips
is what might be discovered, or found, or experienced, in the not getting it that might be of value (how, for example, might one write about a poem if one made no attempt to explain it?) Because this, in effect, is what Freud is saying we might do with sexuality; all our inclinations—including parts of the inclination that is psychoanalysis—are to explain it, to know about our desire; to give oneself and others an account of it ... But when it comes to sexuality we never know how things actually are. On giving an account we make of sexuality, of our desire, something that it is not and can never be. It is as though we are trying to stop having it its effect, prevent it taking its course. [Philips, Missing Out (2013), 78-79]
Of course it was trivially true of Coleridge's grand passion for Asra that had she given-in and slept with him the whole thing would have stopped being a majestic drama of the thwarted heart and would have instead diminished, become people-sized: an affair, sex, one of those everyday human things. The fact that Coleridge wasn't ‘getting it’ with Asra may have made him miserable, but it also maintained the grandeur and purity of his love. It's easy for love to stay elevated and magnificent if it always avoids contact with human actuality. It's probably something of a stretch even to call that sort of infatuation love, though it is surely a specie of joy.
It was evident to the people who lived with Coleridge that he was in love with Sara Hutchinson. He was not good at hiding it. But that didn't mean that these others ‘got’ it—that they understood why this particular woman held such a fascination for him. That's often the way with other people's love, of course (‘what does s/he see in him/her of all people? I just don't get it!’). From an early age,
Coleridge's daughter Sara could tell there was something going-on between her father and Sara Hutchinson, but neither as a child nor as a grown woman reflecting back on those years did she ‘get’ his infatuation: ‘my father used to talk to me with much admiration and affection of Sara Hutchinson,’ Sara Coleridge later recalled. ‘She had fine, long, light brown hair, I think her only beauty, except a fair skin, for her features were plain and contracted, her figure dumpy, and devoid of grace and dignity. She was a plump woman, of little more than five feet. I remember my father talking to me admiringly of her long light locks’ [
Memoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge (1877) 17, 20]. Why
would anyone find such a person irresistible? How could so unprepossessing a woman provoke such overwhelming and life-dominating in a man? As Brabantio could not comprehend what it was about Othello that made his daughter fall in love, so this daughter can't comprehend what it was about Asra that her father loved so.
But then again, you don't have to read very far in Coleridge's notebooks and letters to see that he himself didn't really get it, either. So: she had nice hair. Isn't that a trivial thing to fall for? Then again, what, specifically, about the people we fall in love
isn't reducible to suchlike triviality? Maybe it's best not to pull on that thread, or the whole tapestry of our grand passion might start to unspool. In 1808 Asra changed her look.
Back at Allan Bank in October, Asra took to covering the long hair that Coleridge so admired with a cotton mob-cap. It took away the youthful softness of her face, and emphasized her bony nose and prominent chin. Coleridge was shocked by the transformation: ‘astonishing effect of an unbecoming Cap on Sara. It in the strictest sense of the word frightened me ... producing a painful startle whenever she turned her face suddenly round on me.’ He urged her not to ‘play these tricks with her angel countenance’, but she refused to take it off.
[Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections (HarperCollins 1998), 150]
The fright of this is, I suppose, his teetering on the brink of understanding, of finally ‘getting’, that
what he desired in Asra did not actually coincide with Sara Hutchinson. ‘What if on my Death-bed her Face,’ he confided to his notebook, ‘which had hovered before me as my soothing and beckoning Seraph, should all at once flash into that
new face?’ [
Notebooks, 3:3403] What did he want from Asra, anyway? She was his friend, his amanuensis and confidant, but this wasn't enough. What was it that he wasn't getting from her?
Again: as Mother of my children—how utterly improbable dared I hope it: How impossible for me (most pure indeed are my heart & fancy from such a thought) even to think of it, much less desire it! and yet at the encouraging prospect of emancipation from narcotics, of health & activity of mind & body, worthy of the unutterably [in cipher: dear one], it is felt within me like an ordinance of adamantine Destiny! Sweet Hartley! What did he say, speaking of some Tale & wild Fancy of his Brain?—“It is not yet, but it will be—for it is—& it cannot stay always, in here” (pressing one hand on his forehead and the other on his occiput)—“and then it will be—because it is not nothing” O wife thou art! O wife thou wilt be! [Notebooks, 3: 3547]
Maybe little Hartley gets it, after all. Coleridge doesn't want Asra to become his wife. He wants to
want Asra to become his wife. That is, after all, the real space of joy: between forehead and occiput.
[Illustration of the ‘Valley of Stones’ from William George Maton’s Observations of the Western Counties of England (1797]
