The Heart’s Affections

I was 17 when I finished reading the letters of John Keats for the first time. It was a warm summer evening and I was lying in bed with the volume I’d chosen, rather at random, for my school’s Soulsby Prize in English 1967–8 – as the bookplate tells me today.

Tears poured down my face. I ran to my mother’s bedroom. ‘Mum, Mum, Keats is dead! He’s dead.’ I sat on her bed. She looked up from her thriller. ‘Well darling, it was a long time ago,’ she said mildly. My father had died the year before. I daresay that may have muted the impact of Keats’s demise for her. But for me, who had steadfastly refused to think about my father’s death, preferring to concentrate on English literature and a possible escape route to Oxford, it was overwhelming. He was so young, he was so loveable, his poetry was so full of life. Above all, he was so real. How could he be dead? Tears still come to my eyes as I read the final letters in Frederick Page’s 1954 selection for Oxford University Press. In 1821 Keats, not yet 26, was dying and far from home, having just produced some stunning poetry yet never having made love to his sweetheart, Fanny Brawne. He writes, wrenchingly, to his friend Brown, ‘I should have had her when I was in health and I should have remained well. I can bear to die – I cannot bear to leave her.’ Of course, I now know that there are other letters which Page did not select, showing Keats in an altogether more lusty light; that Keats had probably had sexual relations at least once, even if not with his true love; that the world is monstrously unfair in more ways than the deaths of youthful poets. But I still weep for Keats, even though I have now seen two of my sons pass the age at which he died. The story of the letters opens in 1816 when Keats, nearly 21 and living with his two brothers in rented rooms in London, writes to Charles Cowden Clarke, son of the headmaster of Clarke’s School, where Keats had had a happy education. Keats is writing to tease his old friend into honouring a promise to introduce him to Leigh Hunt. Gatekeeper to a literary Bohemia, Hunt was to be an important mentor and promoter for Keats, whom he straightaway christened ‘Junkets’. ‘Junkets’ – that hit the nail on the head. Keats’s letters overflow with sensual delight: in ‘books, fruit, french wine and fine whether [sic] and a little music out of doors’; in ‘wandering as free as a stag’ about the countryside with his mates; in punning and jokes and rude, dashed-off doggerel; in intoxicated immersion in experience. ‘I can never feel certain of any truth but from a clear perception of its Beauty,’ he writes. Letters were as fashionable a medium of expression then as Twitter is now. Keats often writes, particularly to his younger sister Fanny, about ‘crossing’ (to save postage, charged by the sheet, people would write crosswise over their own words), about how to pick up letters in strange towns, about getting his letters copied so that she can read about his travels. These are letters to entertain, to share gossip and news. Yet these merry, sparkling accounts of tea parties, theatre trips, dinners, walks and visits to friends bespeak more than a young man’s fun. Keats does nothing by halves. He gives up medicine in favour of the poetic vocation, fuelled by admiration for Wordsworth and, famously, Chapman’s version of Homer. He lives beyond his slender means with rueful, intense hopes of his ship coming in – with a new play, with journalism, with an epic poem. And, of course, he falls in love. Women are a marvel to him and, reading between the lines, he was magnetically attractive to them. Not just to Fanny Brawne, but to the sisters of his friend Reynolds, to the wife of his friend Charles Dilke, to his own sister and sister-in-law, Leigh Hunt’s whole circle: all fuss over him and pet him. But there was another side. ‘I must choose between despair and Energy – I choose the latter,’ he writes to a woman friend. Mood swings were intensified by misfortunes. Their skinflint guardian imposed mean conditions on the four orphaned Keats children – John, George, Tom and Fanny. Money and emotion were expended on lawsuits, which grated on Keats’s over-sensitive nature. What he called his ‘lunes’ led him to fall out with good and influential friends like Hunt and the painter Benjamin Haydon. He was so close to his next brother, George, that he resented George and his wife Georgiana emigrating to America in 1818 and reproached them for it, though still filling his letters with affectionate family banter. On top of this turmoil, Tom Keats fell sick and died of TB not long after George and Georgiana had left. Though this tragedy was ultimately John’s own death warrant, it was also the crucible for his writing. Struggling to nurse Tom – ‘his identity presses on me so all day that I am obliged to go out’ – a ‘fever’ of sorrow accelerated his maturity. His words burst off the page. ‘Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?’ In a flood of letters accompanying Tom’s death, Keats pondered on poetry – that particular state of poetic receptivity he called ‘negative capability’ – on love and life. All day and night in 1819 he inhaled scientific and scholarly sources, building, as he described it in the ‘Ode to Psyche’, the ‘wreath’d trellis of a working brain’. ‘I am’, he wrote, ‘a little more of a Philosopher than I was, consequently a little less of a versifying Pet Lamb.’ These letters are masterly prose, matching the great Odes of his final writing year, 1819. So many passages leap to the eye – underlined by 17-year-old me in shaky red biro in my little blue volume. ‘I am certain of nothing but the Holiness of the Heart’s affections and the Truth of the Imagination . . . I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consecutive reasoning . . . O for a life of sensation rather than of thoughts!’ Surely, it is only a thinking person who calls for sensation over thought. But perhaps Keats meant what he said when he wrote to his sister Fanny: ‘Do not suffer your Mind to dwell upon unpleasant reflections – that sort of thing has been the destruction of my health.’ Jealousy became an agony. He could shrug off negative reviews and snide comments. But how to give up what and whom you love? ‘How astonishingly does the sense of leaving the natural world impress a sense of its beauties upon us.’ But a few short years divide Keats’s first gleeful dive into the – then as now – shark-infested waters of literary London from his coughing out his lungs in a rented room in Rome. Although, as I read these letters now, they are haunted by a sense of the end, they still pulse with life. He woos his girl, by fair means and foul:

I have never known any unalloy’d Happiness for many days together: the death or sickness of some one has always spoilt my hours – and now when none such troubles oppress me, it is you must confess very hard that another sort of pain should haunt me . . . Will you confess this in the Letter you must write immediately and do all you can do to console me in it – make it rich as a draught of poppies to intoxicate me – write the softest words and kiss them that I may at least touch my lips where yours have been.

He jokes with his sister. ‘I admire lolling on a lawn by a waterlilied pond to eat white currants and see goldfish: and go to the fair in the evening if I’m good. There is not hope for that – one is sure to get into some mess before evening.’ He begs for money from his publisher; he congratulates friends on getting married; he marvels at scenery – ‘I live in the eye, and the imagination, surpassed, is at rest’ – and broods on unfairness. ‘The first thing that strikes me on hearing a misfortune having befallen another is this – “Well, it cannot be helped: he will have the pleasure of trying the resources of his spirit.”’ In all of this, he is intensely alive: pugnacious, funny and clear-eyed. In that final year, 1820–1, Keats became wise beyond his years. His writing, finally confined to letters after poetry became unattainable, tore away all flim-flam from the process of dying.

I have been well, healthy, alert &c, walking with her – and now – the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense) necessary for a poem are great enemies to the recovery of the stomach. There, you rogue, I put you to the torture – but you must bring your philosophy to bear – as I do mine, really – or how should I be able to live?

His farewell is gallant. ‘I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow.’ How can Keats be dead? I can hear him. And his voice still makes me cry.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 40 © Victoria Neumark  2013