The Books: At Large and At Small, “Coleridge the Runaway,” by Anne Fadiman

Next up on the essays shelf:

At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays, by Anne Fadiman

Anne Fadiman is a Coleridge fangirl. This entertaining and informative essay is part book-review (reading a two-volume biography of Coleridge) and part meditation on Coleridge’s propensity to run away. This was a lifelong thing with Coleridge – and I suppose you could even say his opium addiction was a similar escape hatch. What a fascinating guy and what a fascinating group of individuals: Coleridge, Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt … each a genius in their own way, each eccentric (although none perhaps was as eccentric as Coleridge!) William Hazlitt spoke of going to hear Coleridge speak, and what a life-changing experience it was. Coleridge was a sort of Ken Kesey of his generation. He burned brighter, lived wilder, and the chaos of his existence is something that is almost anxiety-provoking to read about (at least for someone like me, who likes things to be neat and tidy, as much as possible – which is hilarious, considering the mess my life often is … but no matter. I don’t go out and SEEK chaos. Coleridge did.)

Here’s a post I wrote about Coleridge – it actually was his birthday just last week.

Fadiman, in her essay, looks at Coleridge’s desire to run away. She sees it as the theme of his life. He ran away as a child. He ran away as an adult. He was always stranded at some roadside inn, too ill to go on, too broke to pay his bill, and needed to be bailed out, rescued, saved. It’s hard to believe he was married, but he was, and you just ache for that poor wife. But Coleridge had magic about him, a fiery genius, a bright mind, an inquisitive spirit. It’s just that Reality was too much for him. He couldn’t take care of himself. He honestly needed to be looked after, and his whole life, in one way or the other, was about finding people who could take care of him. You have to believe that he was a sympathetic kind of guy, a guy that people liked having around (which is true) – because people were captivated enough by his presence that they WOULD bail him out, offer up their homes for convalescence purposes (and sometimes Coleridge would stay for years). If he were a gloomy and nasty sonofabitch, would he have found such sympathetic rescuers? Anyone who has spent even a tiny bit of time reading Coleridge, will still feel his personality, shimmering there in every line. He doesn’t have the arch and lovely distance of his pal Wordsworth, whose eye sought out beauty and symmetry, and found it. Coleridge is a MESS. Hazlitt described going for walks with both Wordsworth and Coleridge (they both were big walkers). Wordsworth walked along the existing lanes, and Coleridge would leap over fences and go tromping through the weeds. This difference in walking-style is evident in their poetry, too. It says it all.

I’ll post an excerpt from the beginning of Fadiman’s essay, where she talks about the immersive experience of reading Richard Holmes’ two-volume biography of Coleridge (Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772-1804 and Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834.) Although I have not read Holmes’ Coleridge biography, I have read his fascinating book Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, where he talks about his experiences as a biographer, and how often it feels like you are spying/invading someone’s privacy. Wonderful little book, highly recommend it.

At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays, “Coleridge the Runaway,” by Anne Fadiman

Coleridge’s night on the riverbank is retold near the beginning of Richard Holmes’s two-volume biography, a work so vital that it sucks the air out of the readers’ “real” world, rendering it torpid by comparison, and draws us into a parallel world that seems infinitely richer in oxygen. (This is, of course, exactly what Coleridge did in “Kubla Khan” and “Christabel,” whose dreamspaces are vivid enough to trump reality.) That a book should be more compelling than its readers’ lives is in it self the proof of great art. The young mother who ignores her crying baby because she is engrossed in As the World Turns, the teenage boy who neglects his homework because he is busy decapitating cybermonsters, the driver who misses his exit because his favorite song comes on the radio – all have experienced, in ruder forms, something akin to what I felt on reading Coleridge. The difference is not just that Holmes is a wonderful writer; it is that he invites us to enter a real life and live it, year by year, alongside a real person. It is impossible to read this book without forming opinions of Coleridge’s friends as if they were one’s own: Charles Lamb is a brick, Robert Southey a bluenose, William Hazlitt an ingrate, William Wordsworth an egotist. (The essential Coleridge and Wordsworth scene: A soiree at the Lambs’. Coleridge sits at one end of the dinner table, quoting Wordsworth. Wordsworth sits at the other end, quoting Wordsworth.) And it is impossible to read this book without imagining what it would be like to talk with Coleridge (dazzling), have him as a houseguest (arduous), walk with him in the Lake Country (fun for the first forty miles), lie with him in a field to study the moonlight (damp).

I half-woke one morning recently with an obscure sense of dread, nagged by the feeling that someone close to me was in trouble. I knew that soon I would be sufficiently alert to remember who it was and to start making plans to help him, plans that I feared would be difficult and complex and likely to swallow up my day. I turned over in bed and saw volume 2 of Coleridge on my bedside table. It was open to page 240. When I had left him at midnight, Coleridge was lying in a sweat-soaked bed at the Grey Hound Inn in Bath, in December 1813, having argued with two housemates and fled into the night. He was nearly penniless; had missed the last stagecoach and walked five miles in a rainstorm, dragging a bag of books and old clothes; had a terrible cold; and was hallucinating from an opium overdose.

I was relieved. The runaway was someone else’s responsibility. Nevertheless, I was unable to settle down to work until I had read far enough ahead to assure myself that Coleridge would be properly taken care of. (As usual, he was. A benevolent local doctor looked after him for two weeks until a rich businessman of Coleridge’s acquaintance removed the patent to his house in Bristol. There Coleridge remained for nine months, sharing his capacious bedroom with a manservantt specifically charged with suicide prevention. He complained of gout, kidney stones, erysipelas, stricture of the urethra, cirrhosis of the liver, and “angry Itching,” from at least some of which, along with opium withdrawal and hypochondria, he actually suffered. A year later, restored to health, he commenced writing the Biographia Literaria.)