On Literary Fractures

Abstract

Each spake words of high disdain And insult to his heart's best brother: They parted--ne'er to meet ... A dreary sea now flows between, But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder, Shall wholly do away, I ween, The of that which once hath been. --S. T. Coleridge, Christabel (Coleridge's Poetry and Prose, 173) (1) What makes these lines from Christabel describing the fractured friendship of Sir Leoline and Sir Roland de Vaux so moving? Is it that they voice the incomparability of being friends in youth such that, once whispering tongues poison truth, the two exist like cliffs which had rent asunder, permanently bereft since never either found another/To free the hollow heart from paining (173)? Or is it their assurance that the marks of that which once hath been are beyond the power of natural or human agency to eradicate? Is it related to how these lines assumed a life of their own in the complicated composition and publication history of this poem--existing in print while the narrative of Christabel and Geraldine still was only circulating orally among friends? Does the life that sustains these lines independently from Christabel depend on readers' awareness of the actual fractured friendship between two of the greatest English poets, whose poetic collaboration represents the pinnacle of creative synergy and thus whose falling-out threatens to depress aesthetic energy and investments in it? Alternatively, does the life of these lines stem from their being embedded within one of the penetrating poetic accounts of how for speaking beings attachment is a need as foundational as mother's milk? (2) These questions as prompted by the moving nature of these lines underlie my broader interest in the affect and ethics of friendship as rethought by writers whose close friendships were intimately tied to their efforts to be friends of man in the early 1790s. In part, mine is a literary historical inquiry into the fate of engaged writing in the post-bliss climate of 1800-1820, a concern with how various fractured friendships affected the revisions once-radical writers made to their beliefs in the efficacy of resolve as linked to personal and political reform and the capacity of fiction to inspire both. In part, my inquiry engages with contemporary affect studies, especially the tendency to posit the value of affect as residing in its separation from, and precedence over, speech, not simply as a developmental reality (Massumi, 25-27, 35; Clough 2-3, 17-21). The quarrel between Wordsworth and Coleridge is the famous example of a fractured friendship that not only affected both men's concepts and experiences of hope but also reverberated throughout the circle of their writing acquaintances and, I would argue, intensified the period's preoccupation with remorse. My focus here is on an only slightly less famous fractured friendship of the post-1790s, that between William Godwin and Thomas Holcroft. I choose it because this friendship and fracture center on linkages among affect, fiction, and reform and because the lines from Christabel bespeak it in asserting that part[ing], ne'er to meet again! and the indelibility of their tie. Part of what also draws me to the Godwin-Holcroft fracture, certainly in comparison to that between Wordsworth and Coleridge, is how little probing commentary it has received. Biographers usually mention a rupture, though initially they ascribed it to exchanges over Godwin's Faulkener (Brown, 206; Woodcock, 188), until Frederick Rosen's 1968 essay correctly identified Fleetwood as the culprit, an ascription maintained ever since (Marshall, 260, St. Clair, 277). But they usually accept at face value both the definitiveness of the rupture and their death-bed reconciliation as if neither poses a contradiction to the other or is itself riven with ambiguity. The reconciliation not only has the last word but remains the only word that is used to characterize their relationship as most intimate friend[s] or closest friend[s] (Grylls, 54; Marshall, 72). …