Fit for Revival

Thomas Lovell Beddoes, the nineteenth century English poet-physician, is today largely unread. His was a twisted talent, bent on death and the necromantic imagination. His youthful novella, Scaroni: or The Mysterious Cave, groans with skeleton nuns and screech owls as well as having elements of knockabout farce. Beddoes completed this Gothic fantasia in 1819, while he was a school boy at Charterhouse. His first poetry collection, The Improvisatore, published in 1821, was similarly fixated on mortality. Beddoes chose to give the poems the antiquarian term 'fyttes' ('Fits indeed! grumbled one reviewer. 'Hysterical decidedly'). Beddoes was barely eighteen at the time.

Four years later, he enrolled in an anatomy course at the University of Gottingen. Between lectures he conceived an ambitious verse drama provisionally entitled Death's Jest-Book. 'I think it will be entertaining, very unamiable, & utterly unpopular', he wrote (with characteristic glee) to a friend in England. Death's Jest-Book was to be Beddoes' dark, off-putting master work. Despite its imperfections (displays of flamboyant baroquerie and embarrassing English whimsy), the play is also, at times, grimly funny. ('After all', croaks a character, 'being dead's not so bad once one's got into the knack of it.'). Only fragments of the five-act satire shine out as enduring literature, but amid the stilted dialogue and near-static plot are slivers of gemlike poetry (for example the madrigal 'If Thou Wilt Ease Thine Heart') and slices of surreal fantasy (the dirge 'Old Adam, the Carrion Crow'). Overall, one's impression is of ghoulish absurdity, and indeed Death's Jest-Book has rarely been performed except as a sort of Gothic raree show. Yet the play has a powerful, comically nauseated vision of our mortality. Christopher Ricks called Beddoes 'the poet of wormy circumstance', and Patrick Leigh Fermor, patron of the Thomas Lovell Beddoes Society, has spoken of his 'dark humour and mockery'. At its best, Death's Jest-Book exudes a moony ghostliness ('moony' was Beddoe's favourite adjective) and delivers an acid bite.

To judge by Beddoe's correspondence, Death's Jest-Book was conceived as a pastiche Jacobean drama which mocks and 'unmasks' our fear of death. The play has a cast of zanies, jesters and ghosts with strikingly odd names such as Melveric, Wolfram and Homunculus (the 'amateur goblin') Mandrake. With its zoological and anatomical conceits, moreover, it offers a curiously modern fusing of the arts and sciences. Science was a long-standing tradition in the Beddoes family: the writer's father was the eccentric Bristol-based physician Dr Thomas Beddoes, who prescribed laughing gas to Coleridge and urged his consumptive patients to sleep in cowsheds.

Beddoes worked with concentrated energy on Death's Jest-Book, and within three years a first draft of the drama was ready. Dated 1829, it was subtitled The fool's tragedy. Apparently this was the version Beddoes wished to see printed in his lifetime, but friends in England urged him to make significant revisions. Beddoe's young ambition was badly dented by the verdict of literary failure, and for the rest of his brief life he was intermittently suicidal. In 1848, he was rushed to hospital in Switzerland after drunkenly opening an artery in his leg. Finally, on January 26, 1849, he swallowed a lethal poisen. 'I am food for what I am good for - worms', he wrote, minutes before dying. He was forty-five.

In the two decades before his suicide, Beddoes had revised Death's Jest-Book with a view to publishing an improved version. It is not known when exactly the amendments were made, but each alteration was incorporated into the 'finished' work which Beddoes finally submitted for publication in the year of his death. Two versions of Death's Jest-Book are therefore extant: the 1829 version and the 1849 one. Michael Bradshaw and Alan Halsey provide splendid new editions of the two texts which, taken together, provide the first full variorum of Beddoe's defining work. As a writer, his instinct was to amplify, rather than pare down, and he added a number of significant new characters as well as nine new songs for the 1849 Death's Jest-Book. These songs, as Halsey points out, include some of the most sublimely tender lyrics in the English language ('Let the rain on my grave fall pure'), but other additions merely distorted the play's already unwieldy shape and, in parts, made for a stodgy mixture of puerile jokes and unamusing limericks.

Yet, in both the earlier and later versions of Death's Jest-Book, Beddoes wrote wonderfully of life's uncertainty and the chill of supernatural coincidence. In modern times, perhaps only T. S. Eliot approached Beddoes with his sense of our corruptible, death-haunted state. That may be why Ezra Pound remarked: 'Strange, is it not, that Mr Eliot has not given more time to Mr Beddoes (TL), prince of morticians'. Michael Bradshaw and Alan Halsey are to be congratulated on their judicious editorial work. By their provision, the man Graham Greene called the 'filibustering medical poet' is ripe for reappraisal.