Bright Star, Green Light by Jonathan Bate

Author:Jonathan Bate [Bate, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2021-01-14T17:00:00+00:00

Dust jacket of The Great Gatsby

author’s collection

14

‘WHERE ARE THE SONGS OF SPRING?’

Fanny Keats regarded her childhood and teenage years under the guardianship of Mr Abbey as an imprisonment. George Keats had claimed his portion of the family inheritance before leaving for America, and John had lent him a proportion of his own. Now, the widow of their uncle, Captain Jennings, who had been one of the other trustees of their grandmother’s estate, was suing Abbey over the administration of the trust. The remaining funds had provided Keats with a modest income, which was now blocked. Another trust, left by their grandfather for the benefit of the Keats siblings, was tied up in an investment that could not be drawn down and distributed until Fanny came of age in 1824. Keats, ever generous, had lent some money to Haydon, who did not repay it when asked.

In the face of these financial difficulties, Keats began to think again about becoming a surgeon aboard one of the ships of the East India Company. He suggested to Sarah Jeffrey, a young woman who had befriended him in the West Country, that it might be a productive move for his poetry. She told him that such a move would destroy ‘the energies of Mind’. He disagreed: ‘on the contrary it would be the finest thing in the world to strengthen them’:

To be thrown among people who care not for you, with whom you have no sympathies, forces the Mind upon its own resources, and leaves it free to make its speculations of the differences of human character and to class them with the calmness of a Botanist. An Indiaman is a little world. One of the great reasons that the English have produced the finest writers in the world is, that the English world has ill-treated them during their lives and foster’d them after their deaths. They have in general been trampled aside into the bye paths of life and seen the festerings of Society.

But he wasn’t really serious. In a letter to his sister Fanny, posted the same day, he said that he had given up on the idea. He did not really want to leave his friends in the London literary world. Or Fanny Brawne.

Another friend, James Rice, whom he had met through Reynolds, invited him to spend a month back on the Isle of Wight, where they could live cheaply and benefit from the sea air – Rice was an invalid. It was from Shanklin, on the south side of the island, looking out over the English Channel, that Keats began writing love letters to Fanny. He destroyed the first one that he wrote, because he felt that it was too much in the style of the most widely read romantic novel of the age, Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse. His second attempt was hardly more restrained:

The morning is the only proper time to write to a beautiful Girl whom I love so much … Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom.

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