Читать книгу Disraeli: A Personal History - Christopher Hibbert - Страница 9

‘I was bled, blistered, boiled, poisoned, electrified, galvanised; and, at the end of the year, found myself with exactly the same oppression on my brain.’

AFTER HIS RETURN TO LONDON, Disraeli continued to see much of Sara Austen, with whom he went for walks in Bloomsbury and by whom he was frequently invited to dinner at the Austens’ house in Guildford Street. He was working hard on the second part of Vivian Grey, which, as with the first part, Mrs Austen copied out for him from the hastily written sheets of paper on which the author’s handwriting was often so difficult to decipher that she had to make her own sense of it.

When part two of the book was published in February 1827, it did not arouse much enthusiasm. William Gladstone expressed a fairly common opinion when he called ‘the first quarter (me jud.) extremely clever, the rest trash’.¹ Henry Crabb Robinson, the journalist, could not bring himself to finish it and resolved not to try to read anything else by the same author. The author himself conceded that it did not make very satisfactory reading, and that in parts it was actually unintelligible and, in general, fragmentary and formless. It did, however, contain occasionally amusing remarks as, for instance, ‘Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember and remember more than I have seen.’² Disraeli had grown tired of the character of Vivian Grey and in part two he had created a new hero, Beckendorf, whom most readers did not find convincing.

However, he received £500 from the publisher, Henry Colburn, for this sequel to the book, and was consequently able to settle an outstanding bill for £140 which he had owed John Murray. But he could not pay his other debts: he and Thomas Evans, his fellow clerk at Frederick’s Place, still owed Robert Messer well over £1,000 which had been incurred by their South American speculations.

Soon after the publication of the disappointing second part of Vivian Grey, Disraeli fell ill again and, as in the case of a manic depressive, his previous high spirits suddenly collapsed, and from excited gaiety he sank into a trough of gloomy despair. The onset of the illness was heralded by an alarming ticking noise in his ears such as that endured by those suffering from tinnitus. ‘From the tick of a watch,’ Disraeli wrote, ‘it assumed the loud confused moaning of a bell tolling in a storm…It was impossible to think. I walked about the room. It became louder and louder. It seemed to be absolutely deafening. I could compare it to nothing but the continuous roar of a cataract.’ At the same time he felt confused and weak; in the morning he fainted while dressing; the noise in his head he ‘could only describe as the rushing of blood into his brain’. In his conscious state he was ‘not always assured’ of his own identity, ‘or even existence’. He would shout aloud to be sure that he was, indeed, alive; and he would take down one of his books to look at the title page to be sure that he was not just a character in a nightmare.³

He could not write; he could not bring himself to look into his legal textbooks. In 1827, he told Benjamin Austen that he was just as ill as ever; he felt that he was in the situation of those ‘jackanapes at school who wrote home to their parents every week to tell them that they have nothing to say’; and when, in the following month, he went with the Austens to stay in a house in Essex which his father had taken for the autumn, he became more ill than ever.⁴

He was still ‘quite idle’, so he told Sharon Turner in March 1828, still ‘decidedly an invalid’, and ‘profoundly depressed’, undergoing treatment by a succession of doctors who prescribed various and often contradictory treatments for a condition diagnosed as ‘a chronic inflammation of the membranes of the brain’. ‘I was bled,’ he said, ‘blistered, boiled, poisoned, electrified, galvanised; and, at the end of the year, found myself with exactly the same oppression on my brain.’

One of the doctors who treated him was Buckley Bolton, a young physician with a fashionable practice, who prescribed large doses of digitalis, a tincture derived from the leaf of the wild foxglove, intended to strengthen the involuntary muscular contraction of the muscle fibres in the heart. It is a depressant and was, no doubt, responsible for the moods of despair into which Disraeli sank. But Bolton had an attractive wife, Clara, whom Disraeli was to invite to stay at Bradenham, the house to which his father and family were soon to move, and with whom he was to have an affair.

At the same time he began to resent or conceive dislike for various friends or relations, even, for a time, for his father, who makes a recognizable appearance in Vivian Grey, not only as Vivian’s father, but also as the tiresome, pedantic Mr Sherborne, a man who disapproves of most of his contemporaries and even more of those ‘puppies’ who think ‘every man’s a fool who’s older than themselves’.

Disraeli himself believed that his mental breakdown was caused by frustration at his inability to achieve the reputation he felt he deserved. ‘Whether or not I shall ever do anything which may mark me out from the crowd I know not,’ he told Sharon Turner. ‘I am one of those to whom moderate reputation can give no pleasure and who, in all probability, am incapable of achieving a great one.’⁵ He was also, he might well have added, incapable of throwing off the anti-semitic prejudices which he believed lay in the way of his achieving a great reputation in a gentile world.

It has also been suggested that ‘sexual frustration deepened his depression’. Certainly Sara Austen played an elaborate, teasing game with ‘My dear Ben’, keeping secrets from his family (when out of London, she wrote to him at her own address in Guildford Street) and especially from his sister, Sarah, who was determined not to be replaced as the most important woman in her brother’s life. ‘They [his family] need not know that I have written to you first,’ Mrs Austen wrote from Lichfield in April 1828, ‘and I will so manage my letter to Sarah that she shall seem to have the preference.’⁶

Enjoying her role as trusted amanuensis, Sara Austen encouraged Disraeli in his work; and when the idea of a satire on the Utilitarians, which was at the same time to ridicule the novel of fashionable life, came into his mind, she greeted it with her usual enthusiasm. ‘Mind you write Pop,’ [The Voyage of Captain Popanilla] she wrote to him while she was still in Lichfield. ‘I shall want to work when I get home.’⁷

He settled down to work with an enthusiasm which had seemed to have deserted him, writing with his former speed and energy, composing a fantasy about an island named Fantasie, the inhabitants of which, in naked innocence, spend much of their time making love, just as Vivian Grey would, no doubt, have liked to do with the beautiful Violet Fane, a character in the earlier book in which – at a significant picnic in a passage excised in later editions – a ‘facile knife’ sinks ‘without effort into a bird’s plump breast, discharging a cargo of rich stuffed balls of the most fascinating flavour’.

Popanilla, dedicated to Robert Plumer Ward – who told its author that it was equal to Swift’s Tale of a Tub – was published by Henry Colburn in June 1828, and was greeted with even less éclat than the second part of Vivian Grey, receiving but two reviews, both of them short. Cast down by this reception, Disraeli fell ill again and felt no better when his parents took him to Lyme Regis for the benefit of the sea air. Sarah D’Israeli did not know ‘what to say to comfort’ him; nor did William Meredith, his sister’s fiancé; nor yet did Isaac D’Israeli, who wrote:

My son’s life within the last year and a half with a very slight exception, has been a blank in his existence. His complaint is one of those perplexing cases which remain uncertain and obscure till they are finally got rid of. Meanwhile patience and resignation must be his lot.⁸

Concerned about the ‘precarious health’ of Benjamin and other members of his family, so he told Robert Southey, Isaac D’Israeli decided to ‘quit London with all its hourly seductions’ and to take a house in the country. In the summer of 1829, therefore, the D’Israelis gave up the house in Bloomsbury and moved to Bradenham, a handsome Queen Anne house with over 1,300 acres at the foot of the Chiltern Hills in Buckinghamshire, a few miles from High Wycombe, which was itself some three hours’ coach journey from London.

In the front of the hall [Disraeli was to write of this property] huge gates of iron, highly wrought, and bearing an ancient date as well as the shield of a noble house opened on a village green round which were clustered the cottages of the parish with only one exception, and that was the vicarage house, a modern building, not without taste, surrounded by a small but brilliant garden…Behind the hall the country was common land but picturesque…It had once been a beech forest.⁹

Isaac D’Israeli settled down to country life with surprising speed and contentment; so did his daughter Sarah, who was often to be seen in the little village taking food and presents to the poor and sick and giving orders to – and taking advice from – the gardeners. Her younger brothers, Ralph, now aged twenty, and James, sixteen, were also happy at Bradenham.

Benjamin, too, liked Bradenham, and he spoke fondly of its trees, its beeches and junipers and its wild cherries.

He told Benjamin Austen in October 1829 that he was ‘desperately ill’. But, even so, he ‘hoped to be in town in a day or two – incog, of course, because of the duns eager to nab [him]’. He would then find his way to Austen’s chambers and shake his ‘honest hand.’

He had begun another book, The Young Duke, which, so he told William Meredith, was ‘a series of scenes, every one of which would make the fortune of a fashionable novel. I am confident of its success, and that it will complete the corruption of the public taste.’¹⁰

Indeed, he was sufficiently confident to approach John Murray, suggesting an interview and assuring the publisher that it had always been his intention, should it ever be his ‘fate to write anything calculated to arrest public attention’, that the house of Murray ‘should be the organ of introducing it to public notice’.

Not surprisingly, Murray declined the offer of an interview but ‘assured Mr Disraeli that, if he cared to submit the manuscript, the proposal would be entertained with the strictest honour and impartiality’.

This was scarcely more encouraging than the comment that Issac D’Israeli was quoted as having made when informed that the title of his son’s new book was to be The Young Duke. ‘Young Duke! What does Ben know of dukes?’¹¹

Nor were others, to whom the manuscript was shown, as enthusiastic as its author had hoped they would be. Colburn’s reader, who was asked for an opinion in March 1830, had reservations; so, too, had Edward Lytton Bulwer, whose Pelham had been published with great success two years before and whose opinion and friendship Disraeli valued. He was much cast down by these criticisms; but Colburn gave him £500 for the book and, when it was published, the critics were kind and some were enthusiastic.

The Westminster Review told its readers that ‘to parasites, sycophants, toad-eaters, and humble companions’, the book would be ‘full of comfort and instruction in their callings’. But this verdict was exceptional. As his sister told him, without overdue flattery, most of the weekly and Sunday papers ‘reviewed it with excessive praise’. She herself thought it was ‘most excellent’. ‘There is not a dull half page…One reading has repaid me for months of suspense, and that is saying everything if you knew how much my heart is wrapt up in your fame.’

As for Disraeli himself, he protested that he did not care a jot about The Young Duke. ‘I never staked any fame on it.’ It was, he said later, the only one of his books not written from his own feelings and experience. It is the fantastical story of a young coxcomb, George Augustus Frederick, Duke of St James’s, a sprig of one of the richest families in Europe, who is corrupted by society, but redeemed when he abandons rebellion for conformity and accepts the responsibilities of his inheritance.

Disraeli was much more interested in a project which he had been considering for some time, a tour in the East. He went up to London occasionally to discuss his plans with Meredith, who was to accompany him, travelling incognito, as he put it, for fear he might be seen and dunned by the various people to whom he owed money. He was careful, in fact, not to let his plans become public knowledge and thus alert his creditors to his intention of going abroad again and giving them good reason for demanding the settlement of his debts before he went.

‘Keep this letter to yourself without exception,’ he wrote to Benjamin Austen on 8 December 1829, having persuaded him to give him a letter of credit for £500, addressed to various bankers, to help finance his proposed journey to Constantinople. ‘Though generally accused of uncommunicativeness, I like a gentle chat with a friend provided it is strictly confidential and he be a tried and trusty one like yourself,’ he told Austen. ‘Women are delightful creatures, particularly if they be pretty, which they always are; but then they chatter – they can’t help it – and I have no ambition – in case my dearest project fails – to be pointed out as the young gentleman who was going to Constantinople…By the bye, I advise you to take care of my letters, for, if I become half as famous as I intend to be, you may sell them for ten guineas apiece to the Keepsake.’¹²

To Austen’s wife – of whose possessive devotion he had long since grown tired – he wrote three months later, acknowledging her ‘repeated kind messages’, complaining that his health could not be worse and that, of all places, London was the one to which he was least suited.

My plans about leaving England are more unsettled than ever [he continued]. I anticipate no benefit from it, nor from anything else, but I am desirous [of leading] an even more reclusive life than I do at present…I grieve to say that my hair grows very badly, and I think more grey, which I can unfeignedly declare occasions me more anguish than even the prospect of death.¹³

Despite the gloomy remarks about London and his health which he made in his letter to Sara Austen, Disraeli was in town again three weeks later, ‘in excellent spirits,’ according to Meredith, who had invited him to dinner. He was ‘full of schemes for the projected journey to Stamboul and Jerusalem; full, as usual, also of capital stories, but he could make a story out of nothing’.

He came up Regent Street, when it was crowded [Meredith wrote in his diary], wearing his blue surtout, a pair of military light blue trousers, black stockings with red stripes, and shoes! ‘The people’, he said, ‘quite made way for me as I passed. It was like the opening of the Red Sea, which I now perfectly believe from experience. Even well dressed people stopped to look at me.’ I should think so!¹⁴

That same month Disraeli also had dinner with Edward Lytton Bulwer at his house in Hertford Street, together with four men who were, respectively, to become a Secretary of State, Ambassador at Constaninople, a Cabinet Minister and Lord Chief Justice; and, once again, Disraeli was remarkable for the colourful eccentricity of his dress and the wit and fluency of his conversation.

He wore green velvet trousers [his host remembered], a canary-coloured waistcoat, low shoes, silver buckles, lace at his wrists and his hair in ringlets…If on leaving the table and asked which was the cleverest of the party, we should have been obliged to say, ‘the man in the green velvet trousers’.^*

Shortly after this dinner party at Bulwer’s, Disraeli was staying at the Union Hotel in Cockspur Street when he wrote to T. M. Evans, his former fellow clerk, to whom he owed money, and to whom he addressed a long and devious letter, apologizing for having been ‘too long silent’, explaining that it was because, for the last three years, life had not afforded him a moment’s ease, and now ‘after having lived in perfect solitude for nearly eighteen months’, he was about to be shipped off ‘for the last resource of a warmer climate’.

He protested that to leave England in such a state as his, without finally arranging his ‘distracted affairs’, cost him ‘a pang which [was] indeed bitter’. And he said that it would be a great consolation to him to know before his departure that ‘dear Evans’ was ‘prospering in the world’.

He went on to acknowledge Evans’s ‘generous and manly soul’; to say that the first step he would take when he had the power to do so would be in Evans’s favour; and that he hoped ‘some day or other, we may look back to these early adventures, rather as a matter of philosophical speculation than individual sorrow’. He hoped to see Evans, on his return from his travels, at Bradenham House but at present he was ‘only the inmate of an unsocial hotel’.¹⁵

On the day he wrote to Evans from the Union Hotel, Cockspur Street, he wrote also to Austen to say that he had passed ‘the last week, nearly in a trance from digitalis’. ‘I sleep’, he had told him, ‘literally sixteen out of the twenty-four hours and am quite dozy now.’ He could but hope that his forthcoming travels would ‘effect a cure’.¹⁶