Making a false impression
Francis King
CHATTERTON by Peter Ackroyd
Hamish Hamilton, £10.95
Both in its theme of the past being like a corpse which, if exhumed, can infect the present with its miasma, and in the extraor- dinary ventriloquism of its use of pastiche, Peter Ackroyd's new novel, Chatterton, is strikingly similar to its predecessor, Hawksmoor.
At its centre, as the title indicates, is Wordsworth's 'marvellous Boy' — whom most people, without realising it, visualise as the young Meredith, since it was the later poet who became the model for the earlier in Henry Wallis's much-admired The Death of Chatterton in the Tate Gal- lery. Writing of this picture, Ackroyd makes one see it under an intense illumina- tion as though for the first time. Here might be another Ruskin — who himself described it as: 'Faultless and wonderful. . . . It is one of the pictures which intend and accomplish the entire placing before your eyes of an actual fact and a solemn one.'
Chatterton, like Ackroyd himself, re- sembles a spiritualist medium in being best able to grip the attention when he has become the instrument for a voice from the past and the dead. Because of his attempts to pass off as authentic such pseudo- archaic works as his prose Felix Farley's Bristol Journey and his verse Bristowe Tragedy (the latter purporting to be a long-lost work of an imaginary 15th- century Bristol poet-monk called Thomas Rowley), hostile critics have stigmatised him as both a plagiarist and a forger. But Charles Wychwood, one of Ackroyd's present-day characters, is convinced, from the discovery first of a supposedly authen- tic portrait and then of some supposedly authentic manuscripts, that Chatterton was, in fact, the greatest poet in English literature.
This is because, from the evidence of both the portrait and the manu- scripts in his possession, Charles has in- ferred that Chatterton did not die, as is generally supposed, of arsenic swallowed in a fit of despair, but lived on, after a merely pretended death, to write some of the best known poems of such of his contemporaries as Gray, Akenside, Chur- chill, Collins and Blake. But since almost everything in this novel turns out to be as much of a fake as Chatterton's own writ- ings, inevitably both the portrait and the manuscripts are eventually revealed to have been forged. By then poor Charles, a poet, has expired of a brain tumour the first symptoms of which, diagnosed by his GP as those of migraine (even fatal illness presents itself in this book as something other than it really is), Ackroyd describes with chilling authenticity.
Whereas Hawksmoor operates on two time-planes, this novel operates on three. First, there is the mid-18th century, in which Chatterton makes his way from Bristol to London, enjoys a brief success, succumbs to disappointment, catches the pox from his landlady, and then, in an attempt to cure himself, inadvertently swallows an overdose of opium and arsenic (a new interpretation of the facts of his death, previously accepted as suicide). Secondly, there is the mid-19th century, with the youthful Meredith, already in- carcerated in the matrimonial hell so poig- nantly described in his Modern Love, agreeing to impersonate Chatterton for the painter friend, Wallis, with whom his young wife, daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, is falling in love. Thirdly, there is the late-20th century, with Charles Wych- wood and an elderly female novelist, Har- riet Scrope, vying for possession of the truth behind the pretence in the Chatterton story.
As in Hawksmoor, what is best in this book lies in its evocations of the past. Ackroyd has written nothing finer than the passages in which Chatterton first wakes, `feeling unusually merry', at the dawn of an August day; is advised by a wordly-wise friend to take the mixture of arsenic and opium for the pox; buys the drugs; has a strange encounter with a hydrocephalous tot, abandoned by his parents, to whom he gives some money; swallows the drugs and then dies in appalling agony. The account of Meredith and his wife playing with artful cruelty on each other's already raw nerves, while Wallis goes about the business of preparing for his masterpiece, is also excel- lent. In each case, one seems to be in the London now of the 17th and now of the 19th century, as though transported in a time-machine.
Inevitably one wishes that there were more of all this and less of the 20th century, which occupies the major part of the book. This is not to say that the modern sections are not full of interest, but they seem to have been written at a lower level of both emotional and stylistic in- tensity. At present Ackroyd is engaged on a life of Dickens, and it is of Dickens's more vivid grotesques that both the names and the behaviour of many of the modern characters remind one. What, after all, could be more Dickensian than the antique-dealer's wife who, at the outset of the novel, hurtles down a ramp into the shop in a wheelchair, a small violet hat perched precariously on her head, to announce: 'My middle name is poetry.
Sybil Poetry Leno'? What again could be more Dickensian than Charles's habit of literally devouring books — particularly since what he devours at one point are pages of a paperback edition of Great Expectations?
The most entertaining and the most horrifying of these grotesques, a lovely creation, is the elderly novelist Harriet Scrope — herself a plagiarist of a forgotten male novelist of the recent past. Harriet has a foil called Sarah, an art critic, and to these women Ackroyd often gives the kind of dialogue that could have been written by Tom Stoppard. Asked how she is, Sarah begins: 'Well, my thighs—% to be inter- rupted by Harriet: 'Your thighs are your cross, of course. Perhaps there's something strained in the bikini area.' No less amu- singly Stoppardian are Harriet's exchanges with Charles. 'I'll be rolling in clover,' Charles says, to receive her query: 'Who's Clover?' Harriet tells Charles that she did something 'against my better judgment', to have him answer: 'I thought it was against your desk. I thought it was against the wall. I thought it was against the law.' Someone should commission Ackroyd to write a play.
I described Hawksmoor in a review in this journal as diabolically clever. No less so is this book, at once so ingenious in its structure and so various in its styles, moods and literary allusions.
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