A biographer’s relationship with a subject can be as turbulent as a love affair. If the subject is a great writer, the initial phase often has all the ecstatic elements of a romance. Sometimes, as research uncovers discreditable facts, disillusionment can follow. Robert Frost’s anointed biographer was so horrified by what he learned about Frost’s behaviour to his wife and children that he could not forgive him; his three-volume life of Frost devolved into one long, furious indictment. But, with any luck, disillusionment will be succeeded by a fuller sympathy, one that encompasses even the subject’s moral failings; a deeper admiration may emerge, through knowledge of the struggles undergone to achieve the artistic triumph.
In the case of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, much forgiveness is called for, though there is also likely to be awe. Apart from having revolutionised English poetry when he and his fellow Romantic, Wordsworth, published their Lyrical Ballads in 1798, Coleridge was the most metaphysically-minded of all English literary critics, with a far-reaching curiosity that took in everything from science to Sinology. Capable of immense sweetness and generosity of spirit, he was also a spell-binding talker, an enchanter. “Many men have done wonderful things,” said Wordsworth, long after he and Coleridge had fallen out, “but STC was the only wonderful man I ever knew.”
Yet even before his years of tormented opium addiction distorted his character, he was the most unreliable of men: throughout his life, he fled from his responsibilities, failed to pay his debts, scrounged off his friends and relations, reneged on his promises, and—saddest of all—never completed (or sometimes even started) the epic poems and great philosophical and religious works he discoursed on with such dazzling brilliance for hours at a time. Though he may have possessed the most brilliant mind in the roster of English literature—“The class of thinkers has scarcely yet arisen by whom he is to be judged,” said John Stuart Mill, who often trudged up Highgate Hill to listen to him talk—many of his ideas have come down to us as mere fragments jotted down by others. Still, for nearly 200 years he has attracted a legion of eloquent defenders, among them Henry James, who accused Coleridge’s denigrators of “pedantry, stupidity, want of imagination…failing to recognise that one must pay for him and that on the whole he is magnificently worth it.”
Molly Lefebure, too, in her earliest book on Coleridge, A Bondage of Opium (1974), presented him as “magnificently worth it,” for his greatness of character no less than his brilliance as poet and critic. Though she gave harrowing accounts of his less savoury behaviour, which she ascribed to his drug habit, she passionately rejected the charges of weakness, indolence and hypochondria repeatedly levelled at him during his lifetime. The very fact that he managed to curtail his opium habit for the last 20 years of his life—with the help of a kindly doctor who took him into his home in Highgate—was, she argued, a heroic feat in itself, one that few people achieved in the early 19th century, there being so little understanding of addiction then, and no effective means of treating it.
Addressing the charge of hypochondria, Lefebure cited his autopsy report, which showed an enlarged heart, compressed lungs, and a cyst in his chest containing huge amounts of fluid, to prove that he really had been in pain all his life, and hence the resort to opium was not merely a character defect: “The autopsy thoroughly vindicated him.”
So it is an ominous sign that in Private Lives of the Ancient Mariner, her posthumously published book on Coleridge, she no longer adduces his autopsy as any sort of “vindication.” Instead Lefebure reports without comment what his daughter was told by the medical men: that although “there was more than a pint of water in the chest, and the heart and liver were enlarged… the internal pain and uneasiness which he had suffered all his life… is supposed to have been some sympathetic nervous affection.”
Every biography is an act of interpretation, an artfully constructed argument for the author’s point of view; the same facts can be presented in 20 different ways. As we see from these two accounts of the autopsy, by the end of her life Lefebure’s point of view had changed. In fact, on the evidence of her new book, her relationship to Coleridge had irretrievably broken down, as they say in the divorce courts.
Lefebure, who died this past February at the age of 93, devoted much of her later life to work on the Coleridge family. (Her book about her extraordinary early career, assisting the Home Office’s chief forensic pathologist to investigate murders during the Second World War, was recently adapted for a two-part ITV drama, Murder on the Home Front). Summering in the Lake District as a child in the 1920s, she heard the old people there tell loving stories about Coleridge’s son, Hartley. In the 1970s, when her early, groundbreaking book on Coleridge appeared—her insights based on her work with drug addicts after her stint at the Home Office—she was approached by his great-great grandson to write a biography of Coleridge’s wife, Sara: the family were sick of seeing Mrs Coleridge reviled in books about their illustrious ancestor. He then gave her exclusive access to the family papers, which may be what led to her disillusionment with the poet. In her seventies, she retired permanently to her Lake District home and continued her research there; the present book is the product of many years’ work.
Judging from Private Lives of the Ancient Mariner, Lefebure grew disenchanted with her subject for the same reason that Frost’s biographer turned against his. When writing about Coleridge’s relations with his children, she cannot forgive the way he blighted their lives; her sympathies here are almost wholly with them and their mother. Her portrait of Hartley, the tragic elder son, is especially devastating. Under-sized, precociously brilliant, encouraged to run wild, to ponder abstruse philosophical questions and to live entirely in the elaborate fantasy world he devised for himself, he was the object of extravagant admiration in his childhood. But this “Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!” of Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” wound up a homeless alcoholic, roaming the lanes of the Lake District and sleeping in ditches, though continuing to entrance the local people with the tales he told, and publishing some fine sonnets along the way.
Sara Coleridge, the youngest child and only daughter, also a writer, suffered from debilitating depressions all her life. Yet both Sara and Hartley never stopped worshipping their father, whom Sara had scarcely known: when she was still an infant he’d abandoned his three children and their mother to the care of his brother-in-law,
the poet Robert Southey, who dutifully took on responsibility for them all in the house in the Lake District that Coleridge had fled. Nor did Coleridge’s neglect end there. Although Sara and her husband, after long periods without contact, became his amanuenses towards the end of his life, Coleridge had not spoken or written to Hartley for over 10 years by the time of his death in 1834.
Fearful that his pain over Hartley’s fate might lead him to resort to large doses of opium again, Coleridge, who could not bring himself to kill a mouse in his room because “it would be unchivalrous,” banished his pitiful son from his life altogether. Most heart-breaking of all, both Hartley and Sara always felt it was they who had failed their father, rather than the other way around.
As for Mrs Coleridge: as in the biography of her that Lefebure published in 1986, she again presents her as very different from the frivolous, ill-tempered harridan whom Coleridge never stopped blaming for his misery, and whose reputation in the annals of literature has largely been shaped by her husband’s constant complaints. According to Lefebure, not only was she highly intelligent, and quite a “liberated” woman for her time, she was also incredibly forbearing, never criticising Coleridge to her children, despite the humiliating mess he had placed them all in when he abandoned them to the charity of Southey.
There are few biographers who can claim such a long, intense engagement with their subjects as Lefebure. If she sometimes writes as though convinced she has cleared up all the complex mysteries of Coleridge’s character—mysteries he analysed himself, with extraordinary subtlety and insight, in his private notebooks—perhaps it’s because she lived with him, metaphorically speaking, longer than his children, his wife, or any of his other biographers ever did. And whatever her slant on him, she never renders him as less than a vivid human presence. Even if, at the end, she could not forgive him, she somehow makes it possible for us to do so.
