Writing Keats's last days: Severn, Sharp, and Romantic biography.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-MAR-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Boston University

OVER THE YEARS, THE DRAMATIC STORY OF KEATS'S FINAL MONTHS HAS been told and retold by biographers of the poet, who have dwelt at length on the voyage to Italy, the ten-day quarantine in the Bay of Naples, the progress from Naples to Rome, and the last days in the tiny room above the Piazza di Spagna. The narrative of the poet's "posthumous life," as Keats himself called it, has become one of the most moving and memorable in all of literary history. Although Keats suffered a long and wasting illness, the image of him that has prevailed in the modern mind is ironically one of imaginative health. Biographers have focused less on Keats's tuberculosis, on his sick and decaying body, than on his "adhesive empathy" and "sympathetic openness," (1) stressing the infectiousness of his concern for others rather than his disease. (2) The poet represented here confronts his death in a "calm and philosophical" frame of mind, his "doctrines of negative capability and soul-making [coming] to his rescue at the last" (Gittings 611, 621). In this estimate, it is his nobility--his behavior as an English gentleman rather than as a consumptive patient--that has garnered attention, as scholars have focused on his "manly reticence" (Bate 676), "wordless fortitude" (Ward 395), and "gallantry." (3) Thus have the last months come to assume the status of moral allegory, Keats suffering an exemplary death that instructs us about the virtues of masculine stoicism and selfless courage. In our time this has become a story about the etiquette of dying well. (4)

It is curious that a tale with such powerful currency depends on a single witness. Although they note it in passing, biographers have not made very much of the fact that there is only one first-hand source for the events of Keats's final five months. Except for a few brief letters by Dr. James Clark, Keats's attending physician in Rome, the only significant testimony derives from the letters and memoirs of Joseph Severn, the artist who accompanied the poet to Italy, whose patient devotion to his dying friend has also become legendary. Others met Keats in Rome--including Lt. Isaac Elton, William Ewing, John Gibson, Seymour Kirkup, and the Spanish novelist Valentin Llanos, who later married Keats's sister Fanny--but none of these men has left an account of the meeting. (5) It is only Severn who kept a detailed record of Keats's decline and then returned to the subject in a series of memoirs written at various points over the course of his long life.

As it turns out, many of the most famous anecdotes from this time derive not from Severn's contemporary letters and journal-letters of 1820-21, which have been faithfully reproduced in Hyder Rollins' The Keats Circle, (6) but from his later reminiscences. These have come down to us through William Sharp, Severn's first and most influential biographer, whose Life and Letters of Joseph Severn (1892) has remained an invaluable sourcebook for Keats biographers and literary historians. (7) While modern biographers of Keats have consulted Rollins for Severn's letters of the time, they have always relied on Sharp's book for the later accounts, partly because it is so highly readable, but primarily because Sharp had access to what he termed "a great mass of letters, journals, reminiscences, and fragmentary records" (v) which were entrusted to him in the late 1880s by Joseph's eldest son Walter. Since much of this material was scattered and presumed lost shortly after Sharp finished his biography, his book became the only source for these records. (8)

The rediscovery of a large portion of the Severn papers in 1972 did nothing to alter this landscape, mostly because they surfaced with such little fanfare and because they arrived just after the great wave of Keats biographies had crested (Ward and Bate published their biographies in 1963, Gittings in 1968). Because these papers are still so little known--they are currently in an accessions file at the Houghton library and have not yet been officially catalogued--no one has actually compared Severn's manuscripts against Sharp's transcripts. (9) What such a comparison reveals is a high degree of textual inaccuracy in Sharp's book, ranging from basic copying errors to outright embellishment. Through the years a few scholars have given passing notice to inaccuracies in individual letters that Sharp prints, but no one has considered the full extent of his alterations to the Severn memoirs. (10) Certainly none of the major biographers of Keats has acknowledged the fact that Severn's original manuscripts are always mediated through rather than transcribed by Sharp, who has his own peculiarly late-Victorian agenda. Instead they have come to trust Sharp's record implicitly, quoting and paraphrasing from documents in his book that turn out to be extremely unreliable. (11) The result has been a portrait of Severn and a view of Keats's last months that owes more to the silent workings of Sharp's pen than to the representations of Severn's actual language.

This essay focuses on the complex layering of romantic biography and on acts of recovery and representation. I am concerned here with restoring the original language of Severn's memoirs, establishing a more precise sense of individual texts and disentangling--as far as possible--Severn's actual words from the romanticized narrative of Sharp's book. I am equally interested in the cultural context of the narrative Sharp produces (and the personal circumstances surrounding the construction of his text), as well as the way his biography negotiates late nineteenth-century debates about Keats's reputation. Sharp fashions his double-portrait of Keats and Severn at a historical moment when the poet's posthumous fame is once again jeopardized by questions about his moral character and this debate powerfully influences Sharp's selection and alteration of the Severn manuscripts. In the essay's final section, I explore the extent to which Sharp's depiction of Keats has influenced the poet's modern reception, especially in the most highly regarded critical essays and biographies.

William Sharp and the Writing of The Life and Letters of Joseph Severn (1892)

Sharp composed his life of Severn under a number of specific personal and historical constraints that dramatically affected his shaping of the "great mass" of Severn material. According to evidence from Elizabeth Sharp's memoirs of her husband and from Sharp's own unpublished letters of the time to Horace Scudder and Fred Holland Day, the composition of the biography was beset by a number of late-stage problems. (12) Foremost among these was a last minute decision to reduce the size of the memoirs from two volumes to one. As Sharp confesses to Scudder, "this involved a complete reconstruction of the book, and, as I have found to my cost, a complete reconstruction of that reconstruction. In accomplishing this I not only removed over 500 MS. pages of unnecessary though often most entertaining matter, but have practically done away with the record of Severn's life during close on 20 years." (13) In other letters to Scudder, then editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Sharp says that due to his wife's "serious illness," their "frequent journeyings" (18 Sept. 1891), and additional publication delays involving illustrations and the inclusion of "some important early-period matter," a book scheduled for publication at the beginning of 1890 did not see print until February 1892. (14)

As if the revisions and production delays were not enough to encourage editorial shortcuts, this was also an inordinately hectic period in William Sharp's already bustling career. A prolific writer under normal circumstances, by the late 1880s and early 1890s William Sharp was turning out books and essays at an extraordinary clip. Between 1887 and 1890, he completed three other biographies (on Shelley, Heine, and Browning; the life of Rossetti had appeared previously in 1882), and published a number of other books, as well as dozens of essays, poems, art reviews, and biographical sketches. (15) To give a sense of Sharp's astonishing output, we might simply note that at least five other works appeared in the same year as the Severn biography (1892): a novel, a collection of poems, a biographical sketch, a lengthy critical essay, and the inaugural (and final) issue of the Pagan Review, a literary journal whose entire contents were written by Sharp under various pseudonyms. He was also traveling extensively during this time. "By the late summer of 1889," writes his biographer, Flavia Alaya, "Sharp's wanderlust was thoroughly aroused" (92). He toured the United States and Canada, returned to England briefly, visited Stuttgart to collaborate with another author on a novel, made a trip down the Rhine river, stayed for two months in Karlsruhe, and then in the late fall of 1890 traveled to Italy for the second time. He remained in Rome from December of 1890 until the spring of 1891, though he made several trips back to Germany during this period. "Before the year was out," says Alaya, "he was already back in London consolidating his literary gains, and by 1892 he was caught in a feverish new round of activities" (97). One suspects that such "vagrant gipsy-tramps," in Sharp's own words, were hardly conducive to the intense focus necessary to transcribe and edit the Severn manuscripts. (16)

This was, moreover, a transitional period in Sharp's career that witnessed his transformation from mainly an essayist into a full-fledged creative writer. Although he had written poetry and fiction in the past, his great ambition had always been to commit himself fully to a literary career. But Sharp was chronically short of money and had to rely on his journalism and criticism to finance his travels and allow him time for his imaginative projects. While intending to work on the Severn book at Rome in 1891, Sharp fell in love with Edith Rinder and spent most of his time exploring the Campagna and the environs of Rome. His contemporary diaries record a dizzying round of excursions to hill towns like Albano and Frascati, as well as his daily composition of the free-verse poems that would eventually make up Sospiri di Roma (1891). There is no mention of the Severn book until late in the summer. As Alaya argues, it was the winter sojourn in Italy, along with this collection of poems, that started Sharp down the road to his second, secret career as Fiona Macleod, the female writer of Celtic legends whose mythic imagination Yeats was to admire and praise. (17) From 1891 onward, in fact, Sharp engages in what Alaya characterizes as "a burst of pseudonymous writing" (103), becoming obsessed with masks and gender identity.

If the exigencies under which the life of Severn was composed did little to encourage editorial precision, the precarious climate for new biographies, especially concerning romantic writers, would have necessitated some degree of adjustment to the original manuscripts. Although he was writing at a historical moment when Victorian moral biography--and the reticence...

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