Читать книгу A House of Air - Hermione Lee - Страница 24

Edward Lear (1812—1888) made his reputation as a water-colourist after almost no training, and invented himself as an Old Man with a Beard. He is a very attractive example of Victorian self-help. It was not an easy life, of course. English humorists are all depressive, and Lear suffered to the very end from ‘fits of the morbids.’

Vivien Noakes’s Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer (1968), her book on his painting, and her catalogue for the 1985 Exhibition are classics. Peter Levi acknowledges her work without reserve. It has left him free to write an eccentric, affectionate biography, and to indulge himself as well as his subject. Lear was born in Holloway in 1812, the youngest of twenty-one children. When he was four, his father, a stockbroker, was declared bankrupt. Edward had perhaps five years at school and scarcely knew some of his family. He was lucky that his much older sister Anne looked after him tenderly, and he never had to go out to work as a clerk. He was unlucky in having poor sight until he was given spectacles, everything he saw was ‘formed into a horror’, in being epileptic and asthmatic, and in having (at the age of ten) been put through an experience by a brother and a cousin that he remembered as ‘the greatest evil done to me in life excepting that done by C.’ Who was ‘C’? Lear kept diaries, but later destroyed all of them up to the year 1858.

By the time he was sixteen, he was ‘drawing for bread and cheese,’ then made a serious start as a bird painter, and was summoned to Knowsley by the old twelfth Earl of Derby to draw the menagerie. Another benefactor, Lord Egremont, asked him: ‘But where is all this going to lead to, Mr Lear?’ It led to the life of a wanderer, or rather of a voluntary exile. In 1837, Lord Derby (and others) paid his passage to Rome. Lear got himself an attic in the via del Babuino, and began to learn Italian. What was to be drawn was beyond anything he could have imagined, not the antiquities, but the views. At that time, as Levi points out, you could still see the tip of Mount Soracte from the middle of Rome, glittering white in winter, and then there was the Campagna.

Levi believes that Lear ‘became happy from the time he decided to become a landscape painter.’ After nine years in Rome, and the publication of two volumes of Excursions in Italy, there was an unexpected interlude when the Queen, pleased with the Excursions, sent for him to improve her drawing. This was a new opening, perhaps, but it came to nothing. From Rome he went on, travelling in discomfort inconceivable, to Calabria, Sicily, Corfu, Greece, Turkey, Albania, Egypt, Palestine, Athens, Crete. It was his ambition to paint the whole Mediterranean coast, with one last expedition to India. In the 1870s he eventually settled down in a villa at San Remo. As a young man, he had walked almost the whole distance from Milan to Florence. As an old one, he had to be lifted in and out of railway carriages ‘like a bundle of hay.’ But he continued to work. In recording the lands of summer, he made something like ten thousand watercolours.

Levi writes finely about images he loves of countries which he himself knows well. Temperamentally, I think he is drawn to sketches more than to finished pictures, to ‘dew-freshness and variety,’ ‘the heavenly-fresh sketch of the bridge at Scutari,’ yet, on consideration, he believes that the chromolithographs of the Ionian islands are Lear’s masterpiece, and out of these he selects for his one permitted colour illustration the view of Zante, which had worried Lear because he didn’t see how it could be made picturesque. ‘In fact it was that failure which lay at the root of his success…He drew a picture of perfect provincial peace and quiet, enlivened, if at all, only by a few normal-looking goats, but in doing so he expresses the true genius of place…The image has stood still in his eye.’

Lear was deeply interested in technical processes that might create a larger market for him, photography in particular; he didn’t seem to see how threatening it might become to a painter of views. Meanwhile, he continued to make a living in the only way he knew, and as his hero, Turner, had done he either got commissions, or showed his finished works to people who might be likely to buy them. Apart from these, there were his travel albums and the Nonsense books, both of which sold moderately.

Apparently he thought seriously of marriage and proposed twice to the same girl, but since she was forty-six years younger, he must have been certain of a ‘No.’ Friends, the visits of friends, their unaccountable behaviour, their many-paged and always-answered letters, were the defence against ‘cruel loneliness’ and the support of his life, partly because he lived a good deal through theirs. Frank Lushington, the dearest of all, he followed to Corfu. When he heard that another close friend, Chichester Fortescue, had been made Secretary for Ireland, he threw a fried whiting, in his joy, across the hotel dining room. There were tears, also, and ‘angries.’ Not a hint of homosexuality here, Levi insists, but this ignores the many lights and shades of that golden age of male friendship. Undoubtedly, however, the real married couple of the household were Lear and his grumbling old Suliot servant, Giorgis, an unsatisfactory cook (‘Fried oranges again!’) but faithful to the death. Giorgis did not think a poor man should want to live more than sixty years, and in fact died before Old Foss, Lear’s favourite cat, the other presiding genius of the villa at San Remo.

Lear had escaped the fate of a mid-Victorian jester to the gentry, established his own life and planted his own garden. Now, accepting his stoutness, his beard, his strange nose, he mythologized himself, delightfully, though more wistfully, perhaps, than the circumstances warranted, as the desolate Yonghy Bonghy Bo and finally as Uncle Arly, who wandered the world in shoes too tight for him. There was a mythical version, too, of Old Foss.

Levi wanders amiably and sometimes confusingly in and out of the diaries and letters, and up and down the years. But the book arose, he tells us, ‘from an attempt to put together a lecture on Lear as a poet,’ and it seems a pity that in the end he has left himself so little room for this. Lear was a skilled metrist, partial to dactyls (‘Calico,’ ‘Pelican,’ ‘runcible’), and a magic songwriter, with something like a reverence for the absurd. Levi says something about this, and, as a poet, he defends the limericks from anyone who may have found them disappointing because of the repeated last rhymes. But he goes over the edge, surely (as he does several times in this book), when he says that in the 1880s Lear was writing poetry which ‘no one but Tennyson (until Hardy) could rival for its lively and startling originality.’ What’s become of Browning?

Times Literary Supplement, 1995