George Garrett by Clabough Casey;

Author:Clabough, Casey;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781937875138
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Published: 2013-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

[G]amblers and prostitutes, cutpurses and cloth

merchants, felons brought forth for execution, and

prisoners shouting from their windows at passers-

by. The city generates a sense of freedom and

adventure, of constant danger from thieves,

cutthroats, and bearers of fatal diseases, and of lives

lived at the queen’s pleasure that, at any moment,

can be brought suddenly to an end. (“George”)

Both in the boisterous streets of London and in the more formal precincts of the court, the characters speak—not the speech that in Ralegh’s time was actually spoken but dialogue that is better, tighter, stripped of meaningless social platitudes. It is made convincing, not by the archaisms that were employed by Elizabethans, but by an elevated diction, and a formality of vocabulary and tone. The book’s language, then, is a mixed creature: part-Elizabethan, part Twentieth Century poetic prose at its best.

In public moments, Garrett delivers to us the Fox of the book’s title. Whether he is careless of his own fate or arrogant even on the brink of death, or simply playing the role that he thinks proper to his circumstances, he remains aloof and mysterious—his motives are left as riddles of history. His private life is less inscrutable. Awaiting his own death near the end of the book, he remembers his son, Wat (short for Walter), whom he had meant to be his heir and his successor. In his wildness and his overblown courage and tendency to mischief, Wat failed to understand the rules by which his father lived, either those that governed the court or those that governed Ralegh’s personal behavior. Wat enjoyed pomp and circumstance, but Ralegh could never instruct him in the responsibilities that rank required. Posing with his father for a joint portrait, Wat mimicked Ralegh’s posture, but he also made tasteless jokes about his father. He died—either a fool or a hero or a combination of both—fighting as a member of one of his father’s expeditions to Guiana. Ralegh felt himself, on the eve of his death, to be a stranger not only to Wat while he lived, but to Carew, the child of his old age with whom he had never become fully acquainted. Waiting for the moment of his execution, Ralegh writes his younger son a letter. He speaks to Carew of his own youth, of the England of more than half a century before, of old customs, of people he has known, and of his own education. In the last of his writing he comprehends the motives behind his explorations, the good purposes that survived the frivolity of courtly life, and the self-serving machinations of those who lived it.

The same humane impulses inform Ralegh’s last meeting with his wife, Bess. They talk hopefully of a future that they know does not lie in front of them, and of a pardon that they know will never come. They hardly touch the supper laid out for them. Then there is Thomas Hariot, who was Ralegh’s one-time servant, but also his teacher, his companion in adventures past, and his friend. He receives the letter Ralegh has written for Carew.

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