The Warm South

Morning Post

Morning Post

In sleep he returned to England. He saw clouds, green hills and dog-rose bushes; he walked through fogs. Sometimes he was ill in the dream and a cloth was pressed to his mouth or forehead, but he was always able to find his feet again. The landscape might be sunny or snowy; all the seasons came at once, and Fanny was always with him. Her long face moved like a bird’s. She declared her love and drew him close and warm, but her blue eyes wouldn’t stay fixed on his. She was dressed in silks and lace, on her way somewhere he wasn’t invited. Even in his arms she couldn’t be stilled, she laughed at hidden things, he couldn’t find her hand to clasp it, his eyes snapped open and the room’s embossment jumped down at him. The pattern assumed one shape after another till he remembered—he was in Rome, this was the ceiling—at which it leaped back to its full height. He was not dying and Fanny was far away.

Dante was thirty-five, it is said, when he imagined himself straying into a forest so dark that his master poet and lost love had to return from the dead to save him. Keats was ten years younger and lost in the same wood. At twenty-one he had published his first volume, at twenty-two a second. They had won him the admiration of a few, ridicule in the magazines and no money. He borrowed from Charles Brown while they wrote a tragedy; he borrowed from his publisher against his next volume; and the tragedy was rejected by Drury Lane and Covent Garden, and his mythological epic collapsed after two books. His parents were long dead, his youngest brother expiring from consumption. The other, who had gone to America with most of Keats’s money on loan, sent word that he’d been bankrupted in a scheme involving a cotton mill.

In the depth of this wood he fell in love. It was poisoned from the start. He was five feet high with a mouth like a bullfrog’s, didn’t know how to dance, didn’t know how to court, and lived in fear of losing Fanny to another. Severn and Brown were easy with women; they found mistresses for a season, took pleasure and moved elsewhere without catching their hearts in birdlime. Keats was caught. Fanny was everything to him, but he hadn’t possessed her, nor would he till he got money to marry. Surely it was a ludicrous passion. A year ago he would have laughed to hear of someone in his predicament. He wrote Fanny wild letters swearing that his two sweetest thoughts were her beauty and the hour of his death, that he longed to possess both in the same moment. She had sense enough not to answer that kind of thing. Her mother spoke of him as a very odd young man.

Ought he to send his publishers a volume of fragments, the odes and sonnets that his failed epic had dropped by the wayside? Ought he to go to Edinburgh and study surgery? Ought he to take up the apothecary trade in London, become a ship’s surgeon on the India line, take rooms in Westminster and write for magazines? When his hemorrhages began, they merely occluded these questions behind a briefer one—shall I live?—which was only now fading out like a dark sun. A third, patchwork volume had been published while he was ill and had done better than the others. But his quandaries were as before, except that he faced them poorer than ever and far from home.

Out of bed, he moved slowly in pulling on shirt and trousers. Asleep he had been all spirit, and it took time to knit the body around him. Touching real things he became more real. Yellow light fell through the window, in the next room Severn was boiling water. Thinking of coffee, he sucked his teeth; but he must be careful, he didn’t know how his mood would turn. Joy and melancholy always brimmed in him like two colored vials, one bright silver, the other dank brown, and either ready at the least touch to upset itself on the world. He must train his senses on their proper objects. There was his bright window, the desk, his books. At the bottom of his illness he’d passed a confused night when he couldn’t read two words together but longed to have them near, so Severn had carried them all to his bedside, where they now stacked like dolmens: Shakespeare in seven green volumes, his Milton, his Burton and black-letter Chaucer, Dante and Tasso and Ariosto in Italian and English both, Spenser, Wordsworth, Bailey’s and Lemprière’s dictionaries, Ovid and Terence in Latin, guidebooks and grammars and atlases, everything he’d packed in London to make a millstone of his travel chest.

The dank brown things, the frightening things, he would ignore. He kept Fanny’s parting gifts shut in his desk. She had hemmed the collar and sleeves of his blue coat, cut him a lock of hair and given him paper to write her letters. He hadn’t written one.

“Hullo!” called Severn, “are you up? The courier’s come.”

His stocking feet pressed the tiles. They were solid, he was solid. He walked out and found Severn whirling around in an open collar, rattling the dishes as he dragged a side table to meet the chairs.

“Hi,” said Keats, “you’ll ignite your trousers,” and pulled Severn back from the hearth. He grabbed the rattling kettle from the trivet and poured it into the cups, coffee bags bobbing up with the smell of morning.

“White bread,” said Severn, “butter and jam, good Roman milk—and I’ve a letter from Brown to read you.”

“A letter to the Romans! Is it decent for breakfast?”

“It is the work of Charles Brown. Scripsit—” and Severn cleared his throat and sat. “My dear Severn—’tis your name that graces the envelope, for I am maiden-shy of Keats’s condition, yet if he be so far recovered as I hope, you won’t make me cold to him, but will take this as a letter to you both.”

“Maiden was never shy,” said Keats, “once Brown was in the room five minutes,” and helped himself to the bread. As Severn read on, Brown took shape before him: a heavy figure with thirty-four years on his good-humored cheeks, beard and balding crown over a dinner suit, with the dinner to match, say a roast chop and claret, for when one imagined Brown it was always over a good meal. For Severn’s benefit, he began with gossip about London painting. Haydon had exhibited his Agony in the Garden at the Great Room and had not created much enthusiasm. The picture was melodramatic, people said, and represented Judas as too palpable a villain—surely, wrote Brown, Judas ought to possess a good talking face, one an honest man might trust. But the profits were in and Brown promised to recover the money Keats had loaned the painter.

“I shall have to turn bank-clerk to Keats,” Severn read, “since there is no getting him to do it himself. I am yet waiting to hear of a remittance from George in America. Should a sum arrive, Keats will want me to appropriate some part of it, but let there be no question of that so long as he continues disabled from writing—O, I saw Taylor the other day, but had not time to press him on the sale of the new poems.”

“They want quite a sale to recover the advance,” said Keats. “I hope the letter is not altogether about money?”

“No, no. He writes: I hope still to come to Rome, though my affairs are in a muddle. I can’t let the house at present. Abby is living with me again, though not, thank God, in the same capacity as before—she keeps to her own bed and I keep myself continent. One child is quite enough. Between you and me, I think an infant is disagreeable, it is all gut and squall, yet if she holds the little scrap apart it gives me pain. The baptism was Catholic and I hope well enough for the child’s soul, but to speak in a lawyer’s phrase, with the Church of England not a party I may get clear of these entanglements the sooner. Keats is—ah, well, never mind that.” Severn broke off and slid his finger down the page.

“Why,” asked Keats, “what does he write?”

“Nothing of consequence,” said Severn. “He must have forgotten he was writing us both.”

“Certainly Brown forgets things. May I ask what he writes?”

Severn dropped the page and set Brown’s looped writing before Keats’s eyes, as if to disavow it. “You may see. He writes: Keats is fortunate that he and Miss Brawne never risked any such predicament.”

Keats frowned and brushed away the sheet. “Well, that is boorish of him. He knows perfectly well how things stand between me and Miss Brawne.”

“Oh, it was idly meant—”

“Idly! And does he think I mean so idly toward Miss Brawne, that I might treat her as he treated his kitchen-maid? Really, it is only the lawyer in Brown that is not idle.”

“Keats!” cried Severn, with pain in his face. “If you rebuke him you rebuke me as well.” He stirred the jam pot uneasily. “You can’t know what it is to have a child. You may say it was laxity that brought my Henry into the world. But he is in the world now, and I swear to you, it is nothing but care.”

“I don’t mean to deny it. You are not Brown.”

“Brown understands me better than you do on this point.” Severn picked up the letter again. “He writes that the family who are keeping Henry have been round to my sister for money, and that they’ve embarrassed my parents. But it is only his safety I care for, Keats. I’ll be a father to him one day, when I have the means. But a child is a fragile vessel. If an accident should take his soul, before he is baptized? I have terrors in the night. I dream of him drowned, or in a fever.”

“You mustn’t.” Keats took Severn’s arm. “I’m sorry, Joe, this is all wrong for breakfast.”

“No doubt,” said Severn, and tried to smile, but his own emotion had startled him.

“You will get your Academy scholarship, and that will reconcile you to your family. And you’ll get the means to claim your child, I’m sure of it. In the meantime,” he said, letting Severn go, “you know I can’t hold to a faith that refuses heaven to a dry forehead. But as you trust in Providence, you can’t believe such an end is meant for your boy.”

Severn blinked a little, mastering his emotion. “Well, on the matter of faith—” He dropped Brown’s letter and reached for a packet on the mantel. “You have another to try those questions.”

The letter was addressed to Naples, where they hadn’t been since November, and from its worn corners and thick collection of postmarks seemed to have enjoyed a long adventure through the Italian post. Keats’s name appeared in large, elegant letters; but, he said, he didn’t recognize the hand.

Severn grinned. “See the top postmark. Pisa.”

Their only knife was smeared with butter. Keats sucked the jam spoon clean and slit its handle through the seal. Unfolding the sheet, he found a page in the same neat script.

Casa Galletti, Pisa, 20 January

My dear Keats,

I need not say what anxiety I have had these past months for news of you. Knowing that you were bound for this Peninsula, & in grave physical danger, but unable to get further intelligence on either point, I have been in a suspense which is only slightly relieved now that I hear you are at Naples; for this news comes with no clear assurance as to your condition. No doubt you are better already, & will write soon to satisfy my mind that the Italian climate is doing what it ought, & that your Life is to be preserved in the service of many verses to come. On your “Hyperion,” which I have much reread lately, I have more to say than a letter will contain, & would rather have it held in the ampler bounds of conversation. Mrs. Shelley joins me in hoping that you will come to Pisa, where I aim to bestow every necessary attention on your body & spirit—to keep the one warm, & to teach the other Greek & Spanish. Meanwhile be assured that I remain ever,

Your sincere well-wisher,

P.B. Shelley.

“Well?” Severn asked through his bread.

“It is brief,” said Keats, “and gentlemanly. He invites me to Pisa again.”

“I expected he would do it. But can you imagine staying with him? To dine on broccoli and cauliflower, and be told there is no God, and that government should be chosen in sweepstakes?”

“There is none of that in his letter. He wants to teach me Spanish.”

“Spanish? What use has a poet for Spanish?”

Keats sipped his coffee and gently set down the letter. “If I were the son of a baronet,” he said, “and had Shelley’s income, I don’t know what I mightn’t have use for. If he wants to take a villa and arrange Spanish lessons for all the poets of the kingdom, who’s to tell him he may not?”

“Oh, he may do as he likes. But you aren’t obliged to go and amuse him, surely?” Severn widened his eyes. Keats did not return the look; he was lifting and dropping his spent coffee bag on the saucer, watching the folds in the wet silk.

“The whole world has come to breakfast this morning,” he said.

“Well, it can’t stay to luncheon,” said Severn, and pulled the saucer away. “Come, are you dressed to go out? We’re waited for on the Pincio.”