Keats Brothers : The Life of John and George (9780674263789) by Gigante Denise

Author:Gigante, Denise [Gigante, Denise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780674725959
Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

6 BACKWOODS AND BLIND ALLEYS

Winchester

The old stone cottage at the south end of High Street, which John and Charles Brown had rented for the summer to work on Otho the Great, was five minutes from the windy shore and the white-capped waves. From his window, John could see the ships in the distance, blown about by a multitude of sails. When they passed the chimneys on the shingled roofs of the village (or seemed to do, from his perspective), they looked like weathercocks spinning on poles in the wind. The neighboring cottages, covered with eglantine, honeysuckle, and roses, seemed to him fitting abodes for old maids and naval widows living on comfortable stipends. He imagined them in their sitting rooms, beneath low-beamed ceilings, at their card tables, or sipping tea from porcelain tea sets and reading poetry.

Had John been feeling better, his rambles through the hilly countryside might have been pleasant. His friends Jem Rice and John Martin (the bookseller who had printed Reynolds’s first book of poems) had visited. They had stayed up late, as John and George had once done at Rice’s Saturday night Boys’ Club, smoking and playing cards. They feasted on lobster and drained more than one bottle of claret. They teased Brown for his sexual exploits: “Open daylight! he don’t care.” Each morning, when Brown came downstairs in his robe and nightcap, refreshed from a good night’s sleep and ready for breakfast, John prepared to hitch himself back to their “dogcart,” as John called Otho the Great, dragging it along from scene to scene.1

While Brown paced the room, waving his arms and dictating events dredged up from the annals of history—a fury of plots and speeches, complicated by counter-plots and counter-speeches—John struggled to translate the story into verse. They had made it as far as the fourth act when Brown suggested introducing an elephant onto the stage for dramatic effect. John thought he was joking. But Brown spoke so eloquently and fervently on the elephant’s behalf that John agreed to think about it. He’d have to check whether Otho, like the Carthaginian Hannibal, had ever driven elephants into battle.

Every night, as John retired from castles and conspirators to his solitary chamber, Fanny Brawne drifted in, unbidden. Her soft white hand, her lips, her laugh . . . He was “not one of the Paladins of old who lived upon water grass and smiles for years together.” He wanted Fanny—he wanted her badly—but he knew he could not have her outside marriage. Give me those lips again!/Enough! Enough! it is enough for me/To dream of thee! The next day he would project his madness onto Ludolph, his fiery protagonist. “My life!” says Ludolph. “Long have I loved thee, yet till now not loved.” Yet as night descended, images of beautiful, flirting Fanny returned. “Thank God for my diligence!” he wrote to her: “were it not for that I should be miserable. I encourage it and strive not to think of you—but when I have succeeded in

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