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5.0 out of 5 stars
A contemplative novel on the "life" of the poet Chatterton, Jun 5 2002
Thomas Chatterton was a real 18th-century poet. As a teenager he invented a 15th-century poet, Thomas Rowley and wrote poems in an appropriately archaic style. As a young man he went off to London, wrote poems and short stories, but could not sell enough of his work to make a living and committed suicide by eating arsenic. The poems of Rowley were collected and published after Chatterton's death, but it was not until the third edition that it was revealed the poems were entirely Chatterton's invention and his short and tragic life was embraced by the Romantics: Keats wrote a sonnet to Chatterton, Wordsworth used him in a poem, and he was the subject of Oscar Wilde's last lecture. It is not surprising that Peter Ackroyd would be interesting in writing a novel about Chatterton's life, since the author has long been interested in masks, impersonation, and other ways of presenting a public pretense. Consequently, this is not a historical novel, although it deals with real people and real times. After all, little is really known about Chatterton beyond his poems. Obviously dissatisfied with the time and place of his birth, Chatterton creates Rowley as a way of improving his lot in life, or, at least, that is clearly his intention. But in the real world Chatterton cannot function. He takes pride in writing political satires that attack everyone and everything, but in failing to have convictions and a particular point of view, he reveals that in presenting other identities he has lost his true one. In this regard and in this novel, however, he is clearly not alone. "Chatterton" is clearly not a conventional historical novel is that Ackroyd repeatedly plays with chronology. He is more interested in comparing and contrasting events than he is in sequencing them appropriately. There are four stories intertwined in this novel. Charles Wychwood is a contemporary figure, but also a failed and doomed poet, who is intrigued by a portrait which may or may not be of Chatterton. Since the painting is dated 1802, over three decades after Chatterton's suicide, it may or may not be real, but if it is, it raises the question of whether Chatterton really committed suicide in 1770. Could that have been but another instance of transformation and a means of adopting a new identity? In contrast there is Harriet Scrope, a popular novelist who has engaged in fakery and plagiarism her entire literary career and who is now trying to write her memoirs. She has a friend, Sarah Tilt, who is an art historian writing a book about death paintings and once again we have a painting whose authenticity raises interesting questions. This leads us to George Meredith, a poet who was used by the painter Wallis as the model for his "Death of Chatterton" painting. In one of those true stories that reads like bad soap opera, the painter ran off with Mrs. Meredith, only to abandon her after she became pregnant. Consequently, Meredith becomes susceptible to the romantic tragedy of Chatterton's death as well. Chatterton himself is presented by means of an autobiographical document, which comes into the possession of Wychwood, drawing the little circle of characters even closer despite the disparate times and places of their existence. Even without my detailing them you can get a sense for how these four stories are interwoven, the myriad possibilities of linkage drawing the reader further and further into Ackroyd's narrative web. The narrative structure, if we can even call it that, may well be too postmodern for some tastes, but there is a structure here and not some sort of episodic free association. I find it provocative and compelling. Of course every major character in the book wears masks within masks and the novel circles around its meaning rather than arriving at a profound and calculated conclusion. Ultimately, for me, Chatterton is not so much the main character as the dominant metaphor for Ackroyd's novel.
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