Quote of the Day (Robert Browning, on Love)

“Take away love, and our earth is a tomb!”—Robert Browning, "Fra Lippo Lippi" (1855)

Quote of the Day (Robert Browning, on the Human Heart)

“Would you have your songs endure?

Build on the human heart!”—Robert Browning, Sordello (1840)

This Day in Literary History (Browning, Barrett Begin Taboo “Wimpole Street” Romance)

January 10, 1845—With a piece of fan mail that swiftly turned into something more, Robert Browning wrote to a fellow poet, invalid Elizabeth Barrett (in the accompanying photo), beginning one of the great literary romances—as well as the enduring question of why the object of his admiration and adoration had remained so long under the thumb of her tyrannical father. 

Time was, if you came of age between 1930 and 1960, you couldn’t help coming across an entertainment medium—stage, film, radio, or television—without some version or other of The Barretts of Wimpole Street, the drama of how the dashing 33-year-old Browning spirited the frail, agoraphobic poet out of her house and eloped with her to Italy. The story is almost as famous as Sonnets From the Portuguese, the poems written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her husband, a man six years her junior who revived her interest in life by awakening her sexuality. 

The tale of of this dark-haired, wan princess rescued from her bedroom and her ogre father contains the kind of drama that Browning was unable to create in his straight poetic dramas before this, but that he became famous for in his monologues such as "My Last Dutchess." Unfortunately, it also obscures the relative state of their reputations at the time--and, more important, the very real contribution to British poetry by Elizabeth that led Browning to take pen in hand to begin with. 

When they first began to correspond, Elizabeth enjoyed more critical and commercial success than her future husband, both in her own poetry and her criticism. Robert had only begun to gain an audience with Pippa Passes four years before. But it took another generation, after Elizabeth's death, before he rivaled Tennyson as the dominant figure of Victorian poetry.

Elizabeth was more famous at this time. Five years later, in fact, after Wordsworth's death, she became a credible candidate to succeed him as Britain's poet laureate. (The honor went instead to Tennyson.)

All this from a woman who, from her mid-teens, had been increasingly afflicted with what doctors of the time considered spinal and lung ailments. For the last six years, she had not left her bedroom at all, beset by grief over the death of a brother, with her beloved cocker spaniel Flush her only comfort.

But in early 1845, Browning changed her life. After commending her poetry for its “fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought,” Browning took matters a step further: “I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart -- and I love you too.” The extraordinary thing about this last statement is that he had never set eyes on its recipient before—and would not do so for another five months. 

The feeling was mutual. Before she met her eventual husband, Elizabeth had found a picture of him in a paper and tenderly clipped it out. It showed Browning with thick hair and an air of self-confidence—assets that would prove helpful in loosening her from her parental thrall. She responded the next day to his letter, and eloped with him, despite the disapproval of her father (and brothers), a year later. 

Why was Edward Moulton Barrett so adamantly opposed to his daughter’s courtship? At least a few theses have been advanced (including religious). Let’s examine some of these in turn: 

* He regarded Browning as lower-class. Read superficially, this sounds simply like snobbery. (It’s also slightly absurd—Browning’s parents took care of his expenses so he could afford to be a poet.) But it has an important implication, which I’ll call the “Dr. Sloper Corollary” (in honor of the Henry James father in Washington Square and the play and film it inspired, The Heiress): i.e., Browning was not so much interested in Mr. Barrett’s daughter as in her money—i.e., Mr. Barrett’s money, that is. 

* He had abused his eldest daughter and was insanely jealous of anyone who threatened to disrupt the relationship. In recent years, as such matters have become more talked-about on shows such as Oprah, this theory has gained traction. It’s a contention all but impossible to disprove, because, one could argue, the Victorians, with their standards of propriety, would surely have destroyed any documentary evidence proving this. One person who believed it was Charles Laughton, who played Edward Barrett, in all his muttonchop glory, onscreen in the 1934 film adaptation of The Barretts of Wimpole Street. Told that the script would need to excise lines implying incest, Laughton responded: “They can’t censor a gleam in my eye.” (See this YouTube excerpt to see how Laughton made this one of his indelible screen portraits of tyrants.) 

* He feared the consequences of his family’s mixed-blood heritage—and especially couldn’t abide the thought that this racial impurity would be compounded if Elizabeth took up with another product of miscegenation. The prior two explanations are perfectly adequate in accounting for why Edward Barrett forbade Elizabeth from marrying. Unfortunately, it doesn’t explain why Edward Barrett forbade any of his kids who survived to adulthood from marrying—not just the three daughters, but all nine of his sons. Such a sweeping ban could be required, some have argued, only if Barrett feared that black blood in the family line would be perpetuated—multiplied, even—if his daughter married Browning.

Barrett's affluence was based on the family sugarcane plantation in Jamaica, where they had held slaves for years (until, that is, the practice had been banned in the British Empire the decade before). He could not be sure that none of his forbears did not have slave parentage.

Worse than this (for Mr. Barrett, anyway), according to biographer Julia Markus, was that Browning's own lineage posed the same issues.

Quote of the Day (Robert Browning, on "The Ring and the Book")

“I can have but little doubt but that my writing has been, in the main, too hard for many I should have been pleased to communicate with; but I never designedly tried to puzzle people, as some of my critics have supposed. On the other hand, I never pretended to offer such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar, or a game of dominoes, to an idle man. So perhaps, on the whole, I get my desserts and something over, — not a crowd, but a few I value more.”—British poet and playwright Robert Browning (1812-1889), to friend W.G. Kingsland, in a Nov. 27, 1868 letter, quoted by W. Hall Griffin, The Life of Robert Browning With Notices of His Writings, His Family and His Friends (1889)

Browning told Kingsland he’d been “far from well, and oppressed by work.” No wonder—he was preparing for publication his epic “murder-poem,” The Ring and the Book. The first volume had appeared six days before Browning’s letter, while the remaining three appeared in each of the following months.

This was indeed a far cry from the American poet Longfellow—who, as I discussed the other day, despite his vast learning, could be read by a larger middle-class audience—but also from the more obscure verses that T.S. Eliot would create in the 20th century. Imagine a Baroque-era Rashomon, set in Rome in 1698, concerning the trial of a count, accused of murdering his wife over her alleged affair with a young minor cleric.

Only it’s more than that—so much more. The poem is long (more than 600 pages, not counting notes, in my edition), consisting of 12 sections or books. The action advances, then refocuses, in a series of dramatic monologues, including by the victim, Pompilia, her would-be clerical rescuer, the “man in the street,” the murderer himself, Guido Franceschini, and even Pope Innocent XII (to whom Guido unsuccessfully appealed his guilty verdict).

Browning, who inherited his lifelong fascination with crime from his father, discovered this real-life case when he picked up for a pittance “an old yellow book” from a Florentine bookstall. The beat-up volume was a documentary goldmine, containing legal briefs, pamphlets and letters about the case.

Over the last 15 years, commentators have noted similarities between this case and O.J. Simpson’s. Each contained an element of all-consuming interest for the contemporary society of its day: Catholicism for Rome, race for America.

Although we have to be careful about the dangers of presentism (i.e., judging an incident from the past overwhelmingly with reference to our time and little or none to its own) and some large differences remain (e.g., O.J. was never executed or even found guilty at a criminal trial for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole and Ron Goldman), some factors figure prominently in both cases:

* Class—Simpson rose from a low-income neighborhood, Putrero Hill, Calif., just outside San Francisco, to a $5 million Tudor mansion in Brentwood. Franceschini managed to marry into the wealthy Comparini family by misrepresenting his origins as a poor nobleman of inferior rank.

* Domestic violence—L.A. police were constantly called to the Simpson house because of domestic disputes, but in all but one case did not press charges. The Comparani family were enraged that their daughter was living in an impoverished and abused condition, and sought to deny their son-in-law the dowry he would normally have received by claiming in court that Pompilia was adopted—in actuality, the daughter of a prostitute they had saved out of pity—and that, thus, she was illegitimate and her husband was not entitled to their money.

* Legal wrangling--In addition to his infamous criminal trial, Simpson also faced over the years a successful civil suit brought by the father of Ron Goldman--along with the aforementioned calls to the home by the LAPD, two divorces, and his more recent conviction on all charges from a Las Vegas incident involving robbery with a deadly weapon, burglary with a firearm, and others too numerous to mention. A judgment in favor of Guido regarding the dowry settlement was still being appeared at the time of the murder, while a second suit, the summer before the crime, resulted in Caponsacchi being confined to Civita Vecchia for violating his oath of celibacy and in Pompilia being placed in the care of the Scalette Convent.

* Collateral damage—Ron Goldman was unlucky enough to be around when Nicole Simpson was murdered. So were Pompilia’s parents when Guido and the assassins he’d hired came to kill his wife. Goldman suffered multiple stab wounds; the Comparinis were decapitated by the assassins. (Pompilia was mortally wounded, living just long enough to finger her abusive estranged husband.)

* Blaming the victim—Guido sued his wife and minor cleric Guiseppe Caponsacchi for adultery and flight before the Jan. 2, 1698 murder. After Pompilia’s death, an order of nuns, the Convent of Convertites, unsuccessfully sought her estate on the ground that she was a “debased woman.” The Simpson defense team floated, without any evidence, the highly speculative theory that Nicole Simpson had died as part of a Colombian drug hit meant for good friend Faye Resnick.

* Media sensations—Just as the Lindbergh kidnapping case demonstrated the power of the relatively new medium of radio news reporting, the Simpson case confirmed the arrival of the cable-driven, 24-hour news cycle. Neither tabloids nor cable TV were around in the 17th century, but it’s now clear that the murders of the Comparinis were of all-consuming interest during its time. Browning scholars confirmed in the 20th century that the “old yellow book” found by the poet, along with another account presented him by a friend two years later, were not the only contemporary accounts of the case; other manuscripts were found in the Royal Casanatense Library in Rome; the Armstrong Browning Collection at Baylor University, Texas; and a codex twice as large as “the old yellow book” found in the Biblioteca del Comune in Cortona.

Perhaps somebody has done this already, but I think an interesting book could be written on literary masterpieces inspired by real-life tabloid-style crimes. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is one; Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (which I discuss here) was another. The Ring and the Book deserves inclusion on this list.