1. Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770)
Thomas Chatterton is one of the most famous obscure poets who ever lived. His work is obscure for two reasons: Although he worked at a Schubertian pace, he died several months before his eighteenth birthday; no one, not even Catullus, died that young and left a major body of work behind. The second reason for his obscurity is that he wrote mostly in a pseudo-archaic style; he attributed many of his poems to the fictive Thomas Rowley, whom Chatterton claimed to have been a fifteenth century poet. Many contemporaries believed him, but, like Ossian, a would-be Scots epic from ancient times, which later was proven to have come from the contemporary pen of James MacPherson, Thomas Rowley's work turned out to be a forgery as well.
That Chatterton was a genius, of that there is no doubt. Born into excruciating poverty, (his father died before he was born), Chatterton became a voracious reader and writer, producing significant poetry from the age of eleven on. He moved to London, shortly before his death; he thought he would soon be making a living as a poet, which was hard in those days, albeit much harder now. His work was accepted everywhere, but the payment he received provided him with much less than a living wage. The editors were exploitive, to say the least. (One thinks of the title of Joyce's collection of poems, written when Joyce was in his thirties, Pomes Penyeach. In contrast to Chatterton, however, the Irish novelist was born into a middle-class family. The title has a metaphorical meaning, perhaps "the best things in life are free." He certainly wasn't referring to what he thought his poems were worth!)
Chatterton was starving. Eventually, he refused to endure the twin poisons of obscurity and penury any longer; he swallowed arsenic and died, still a teenager.
It was his suicide that made him famous. It helped usher in the age of Romanticism. His dis-ease, brought about by a cruel world that ignored him, was apparently as effective in establishing his Romantic legacy as the Romantic disease, consumption, tuberculosis. (At first, consumption was thought to have an emotional etiology; for instance, Byron attributed the cause of Keats's demise to bad reviews. About a century later, however, consumption proved to be caused by a relentless and very un-Romantic microorganism).
Here is an excerpt form one of Chatterton's poems:
Comme, whythe accorne-coppe and thorne,
Dryane me hartys blodde awaie;
Lyfe and all ytes goode I scorne,
Daunce by nete, or feaste by daie.
Mi love ys dedde,
Gone to his death-bedde,
Al under the wyllowe tree.
This is from a poem of many stanzas entitled, Mynstrelles Songe. This excerpt indicates that the fictive Thomas Rowley knew his Shakespeare; it also indicates that the flesh-and-blood Chatterton had an excellent ear.
These days few read Chatterton's poems. This is due to the lamentable fact that very few read poetry at all, much less eighteenth century verse; in addition, as previously mentioned, Chatterton's attempt at antiquated English provides a double remove.
2. A Diversion
I couldn't resist including at this point a YouTube clip of a delightful song--even though it's about suicide--by Serge Gainsbourg, entitled "Chatterton." Gainsbourg, 1928-1991, was the French Bob Dylan, who excelled as a lyricist as well as a composer--a rare combination, Bob Dylan and Cole Porter being two outstanding examples. Here is my translation of the first verse of the song:
Chatterton committed suicide;
Hannibal committed suicide;
Demosthenes committed suicide;
Nietzsche went mad;
As for me (Whoo!)
As for me,
Things aren't going very well anymore.
A song about suicide in an upbeat major key! Only the French can do something like this. Contrast it to the excruciating pathos of Schubert's marvelous Winterreise. For me, Gainsbourg's deliberate avoidance of cloying sorrow here makes the song all the more poignant. The ridiculous whoop after the first "as for me" is a stroke of genius; it lets off steam just at the right time, preventing a descent into hyper-pathos. It is also crazy. The protagonist is perhaps not serious about suicide at all; perhaps he is merely a vain (young?) man, feeling sorry for himself. Perhaps he will patch things up with his girlfriend and feel just fine the next day. Perhaps his depression is a passing phenomenon. Perhaps not. The juxtaposition of historical tragedy with an ambiguous contemporary confession makes the song, for me at least, outstanding. When I first heard it--especially that whoo!-- I laughed out loud.
3. What's in a Name
I was inspired to write this little desultory essay after reading "Name Stakes," (Harper's Magazine, June 2021), by the brilliant African-American writer, Thomas Chatterton Williams. About to become a father for the second time, Williams pondered over what to name his son, and wondered why he, the author, had been named Thomas Chatterton Williams, an odd name for an African American, to be sure. In addition to the fact that the name has a mellifluous ring to it; in addition to the fact that the middle name differentiated Williams from the countless Thomas Williamses in every urban phone directory of the country, the author's father justified the name with the following words: "My feeling became not to honor rulers and elites, but those who were locked out by them." He realized that his son, who would grow up as an African American in Newark, New Jersey, would face daunting hurdles. (His chances of success reminded me of the fact that only one out of a hundred crabs reach successful adulthood. Many, barely hatched, are swept out to sea.) Yet Thomas Chatterton Williams has proven that flourishing in an indifferent world is possible--not for everyone, alas!--being gifted like his namesake certainly helped.
Chatterton Williams travels to London to trace the story behind his name. He sees the famous painting by Henry Wallis, a fascinating depiction of the suicide of the "Kurt Cobain of Bristol," which hangs rather inconspicuously in the Tate Gallery.
Williams quotes an immortal couplet from Chatterton's African Eclogues: "The pale children of the feeble sun, who/ in search of gold, through every climate run." (Well, that greedy band, with increasing members of 'dark children of the brawny sun' is still running strong, isn't it?)
The author's father is apparently quite intelligent and obviously carefully selected his son's name. I would like to contrast him with members of my own family and my experience as a doctor in Baltimore, Maryland.
My brother and I were the first in the immediate family to have gone to college. The only one in the family who had read some books--he was rather fond of Dickens--was my father, who never graduated from high school. Mentally ill, suffering from alcoholism and severe depression, he had no surplus attention to carefully select our names. The choice of my name, Thomas, seems to have been quite arbitrary; there are no Thomases in our family tree. My middle name, Andrew, seems to have been arbitrarily chosen as well. My brother's name is Robert Hammond Dorsett, 'Hammond' was my mother's maiden name. I suspect she gave him that middle name to honor her rather obstreperous father. (In true upper-class Protestant tradition, he would have been named 'Hammond Dorsett'--we, of course, were--if we had worked a little harder--of the working-class.)
My father received his middle name, Fulton, after Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat. (No trace of success ever accompanied his namesake, alas!)
After I had become a doctor, I practiced as a pediatrician in Baltimore, and came across many inventive names in the nursery. African Americans, like the Chinese, tend to give their children distinctive names, e.g. Savion Glover and Simemem Etute. At one time, I was about to suggest that a nurse be available to help with spelling, e.g. 'Xavier' was often misspelled, and thus pronounced as it was written, 'X-zavier."
When I was in medical school in Newark, I encountered a man, dying of cirrhosis at age 29, with the meanest first name of all: what decent parent would ever name their ebony-hued son 'Blondie?' No wonder he had become an alcoholic.
I also heard of a man who had named his twins, Syphilis and Gonorrhea. There should be a law. (In Germany, there is.)
I will close with the name of a patient whom I treated at a Johns Hopkins clinic. I looked at the name on the chart. When he was in my office, I told him his name, Cire, meant 'wax' in French. He looked at me quizzically. It's pronounced "Kai-Rhee," he told me. The young man was apparently named after a famous basketball player--O where was that fictive nurse from the nursery?
"A rose by any other name smells as sweet"--Shakespeare was perhaps only partially right. What if the rose's name were Stinko? Wouldn't this name negatively influence one's would-be rosy olfactory perception?
Named after nobody, I sometimes feel like one of those crabs that didn't survive. Yet I did survive. And even if my name had been, say, Aloysius, I am (fairly) confident that I would still (mostly) be as I am today: very very grateful to be alive.
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