The Rings of Saturn (17 page)

VIII

T
he day after my visit to Middleton I fell into conversation with a Dutchman named Cornelis de Jong in the bar of the Crown Hotel in Southwold. He had been to Suffolk on a number of occasions and was now thinking of buying one of the vast properties, often running to more than a thousand hectares, that are regularly offered by estate agents hereabouts. De Jong told me that he had grown up on a sugar plantation near Surabaya and later, after studying at the Wageningen Agricultural College, continued the family tradition in a somewhat straitened fashion as a sugar-beet farmer in the Deventer area. If he was now planning to transfer his interests to England, it was primarily for economic reasons, said de Jong. Single estates of the size regularly appearing on the East Anglian market never came up for sale in Holland, and manor houses of the kind that were practically thrown in for nothing with the land here were not to be found at home either. In their heyday, said de Jong, the Dutch invested chiefly in cities, while the English put their money into country estates. That evening in the bar, we talked till last orders
were called about the rise and decline of the two nations and about the curiously close relationship that existed, until well into the twentieth century, between the history of sugar and the history of art. For long periods of time there was little scope for an ostentatious display of accumulated wealth, and consequently the enormous profits that accrued to the few families who grew and traded in sugar cane were largely lavished on the building, furnishing and maintenance of magnificent country residences and stately town houses. It was Cornelis de Jong who drew my attention to the fact that many important museums, such as the Mauritshuis in The Hague or the Tate Gallery in London, were originally endowed by the sugar dynasties or were in some other way connected with the sugar trade. The capital amassed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through various forms of slave economy is still in circulation, said de Jong, still bearing interest, increasing many times over and continually burgeoning anew. One of the most tried and tested ways of legitimizing this kind of money has always been patronage of the arts, the purchase and exhibiting of paintings and sculptures, a practice which today, said de Jong, was leading to a relentless escalation of prices paid at major auctions. Within a few years, the hundred million mark for half a square yard of painted canvas will have been passed. At times it seems to me, said de Jong, as if all works of art were coated with a sugar glaze or indeed made completely of sugar, like the model of the battle of Esztergom created by a confectioner to the Viennese court, which Empress Maria Theresia, so it is said, devoured in one of her recurrent bouts of melancholy. The morning after our conversation in the Crown Hotel Bar,

which extended to the plantation and production methods employed in the Dutch East Indies, I drove down to Woodbridge with de Jong. The arable land he wanted to view stretched westward from the outskirts of that small town, and was bordered to the north by the deserted estate of Boulge, which I had in any case intended to visit, for it was at Boulge that the writer Edward FitzGerald grew up almost two hundred years ago, and there too he was buried in the summer of 1883. After I had parted from Cornelis de Jong, with a warmth which it seemed he returned, I first crossed the fields from the A12 towards Bredfield, where FitzGerald was born on the 31st of March 1809 at the White House, of which all that now remains is the orangery. The main wing of the building, which went back to the mid-eighteenth century and could accommodate a large family and a no-less numerous staff of servants, was levelled to the ground in May 1944 when one of the German V-bombs, which the English nick-named “doodlebugs”, suddenly deviated from its course and caused
wholly pointless damage in remote Bredfield. Boulge Hall, the neighbouring manor house into which the FitzGeralds moved in 1825, has also gone. After it burnt down in 1926, the charred walls long remained standing in the heart of the estate. Not until after the Second World War was the ruin completely demolished, presumably for building material. The park itself is now neglected, and the grass has gone unmown for years. The great oaks are dying branch by branch, and the driveways, patched up here and there with broken bricks, are full of potholes brimming with black water. The copse which enclose the little church of Boulge, which the FitzGeralds restored in a rather infelicitous fashion, is similarly neglected. Rotting timber, rusting iron and other debris lies around everywhere. The graves are half sunk into the ground, overshadowed by the encroaching sycamores. Small wonder, I thought, that FitzGerald, who abhorred funerals and indeed every kind of ceremony, did not wish to be buried in this sombre place and wanted his ashes scattered on the

glittering waters of the sea. If, nonetheless, he lies here, in a grave beside the hideous family mausoleum, it is owing to one of those wicked ironies against which even last wills and testaments are powerless. The FitzGeralds were an old Anglo-Norman family and had lived in Ireland for more than six hundred years before Edward FitzGerald's parents decided to settle in the county of Suffolk. The family fortune, amassed over generations through warring feuds with other lords, by ruthless subjection of the local people and by a no less ruthless marriage strategy, was legendary even at a time when the wealth of the topmost social strata was beginning to exceed all that had hitherto been known, and consisted principally, apart from properties in England, of their vast land holdings in Ireland, together with the goods and chattels, and hosts of peasants who were effectively no more than their serfs. Mary Frances FitzGerald, Edward's mother, was the sole heir to this fortune, and thus without any doubt one of the richest women in the kingdom. Her cousin, John Purcell, whom she had married, mindful of the family's motto “stesso sangue, stessa sorte”, gave up his own name in favour of the name of FitzGerald, in recognition of his wife's superior position; while for her part, needless to say, Mary Frances FitzGerald saw to it that her title to the fortune was not diminished in the smallest degree by her marriage to John Purcell. The portraits that have come down to us show her as a formidable woman with powerful, sloping shoulders, a truly awe-inspiring bust, and an overall appearance that astounded many contemporaries by its resemblance to the Duke of Wellington. As one would expect, the cousin she had married soon paled to a negligible if not contemptible figure beside her, especially since none of his attempts to secure for himself a position in the
rapidly proliferating new industries met with any success. He tried his hand as a mining entrepreneur and at various other speculative ventures, but one after another failed until at length he had gone through all of his own not inconsiderable fortune as well as the money his wife had made available to him. After bankruptcy proceedings in a London courtroom, all that remained to him was the reputation of being a hopeless and chronic defaulter, kept by the charity of his wife. Hence he spent most of his time at the family seat in Suffolk, hunting quail and snipe and occupying himself in other similar ways, while Mary Frances held court at her London residence. Occasionally she would arrive at Bredfield in a canary-yellow carriage drawn by four black horses, with a luggage waggon and a large number of footmen and lady's maids in her retinue, to see how the children were and to uphold, by a brief sojourn in the house, her claims to dominion in this, from her point of view, impossibly remote place. Whenever she arrived or departed, Edward and his siblings would stand petrified at the windows of their attic nursery or hide in the driveway shrubbery, too intimidated by her splendour to dare run towards her, or wave goodbye. Even when he was past sixty, FitzGerald recalled that on visits to Bredfield his mother would sometimes come upstairs and there, enveloped in her rustling clothes and a great cloud of scent, would stalk to and fro like some strange giantess for a while, remarking upon this or that, only to disappear once again down the steep staircase, leaving us children, as he said, not much comforted. Since their father was increasingly absorbed in his own world, the young FitzGeralds were left entirely in the care of their nanny and tutor, whose rooms were also on the top floor and who tended to take out on their charges their suppressed rage at the
disrespect many a time shown them by their masters. The fear of these reprisals and the humiliation that went with them hung over the children's daily routine which, apart from the cheerless meals they had to take with their minders, was governed by eternal arithmetic and writing exercises, the most odious of which was penning a weekly report to Mother. In addition to this regime, they suffered from extreme boredom, for they had next to no contact with others their own age and thus all they could think of doing in their free time was to lie day-dreaming for hours on the blue-varnished floorboards in the nursery or to gaze out of the windows into the park, where hardly a living soul was ever to be seen. At best the gardener would be pushing a wheelbarrow across the lawn or Father would be returning from a shoot with the gamekeeper. Only on rare crystal-clear days, FitzGerald later recalled, could one sometimes see beyond Bredfield and indistinctly discern, over the tree tops, the white sails of ships off the coast ten miles away; and then one would lose oneself in vague dreams of liberation from this childhood dungeon. Later, when he had finished his studies at Cambridge, FitzGerald's horror of his heavily-carpeted family home stuffed with gilded furniture, works of art, and trophies of travel was so great that he refused to set foot in it again. Instead of taking up residence there, in keeping with his station, he moved into a tiny two-roomed cottage on the perimeter of the estate, and there he spent the next fifteen years, from 1837 till 1853, leading a bachelor life that in many respects anticipated his later eccentricity. In the main he kept himself occupied in his hermitage with reading, in a variety of languages, with writing countless letters, with making notes towards a dictionary of commonplaces, with compiling a complete glossary of all words and phrases relating to
the sea and to seafaring and with pasting up scrap books of every conceivable description. He had a particular predilection for the correspondence of bygone ages, such as that of Madame de Sévigné, who became far more real to him than even his friends who were still alive. Time after time he read what he had written, quoted her in his own letters, continuously added to the materials he was assembling for a Sévigné dictionary which would not only provide commentary on all her correspondents and all the persons and places referred to in their exchange but would also offer a key of sorts to the way in which she had cultivated and developed the art of writing. FitzGerald did not complete the Sévigné project any more than he completed his other literary schemes, and probably never wanted to. It was not until 1914, when the era came to a close, that one of his great-nieces edited two tomes, now extremely hard to come by, from that voluminous compilation, which lies preserved in a few cardboard boxes in Trinity College library. The only task FitzGerald finished and published in his lifetime was his marvellous rendering of the
Rubaiyat
of the Persian poet Omar Khayyam, with whom he felt a curiously close affinity across a distance of eight centuries. FitzGerald described the endless hours he spent translating this poem of two hundred and twenty-four line as a colloquy with the dead man and an attempt to bring to us tidings of him. The English verses he devised for the purpose, which radiate with a pure, seemingly unselfconscious beauty, feign an anonymity that disdains even the least claim to authorship, and draw us, word by word, to an invisible point where the mediaeval orient and the fading occident can come together in a way never allowed them by the calamitous course of history.
For in and out, above, about, below,/'Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-Show, /
Play'd in a Box whose Candle is the Sun,
/
Round which the Phantom Figures come and go.
The
Rubaiyat
was published in 1859, and it was also in that year that William Browne, who probably meant more to FitzGerald than anyone else on earth, died a painful death from serious injuries sustained in a hunting accident. The paths of the two men had first crossed on a walking tour of Wales, when FitzGerald was twenty-three and Browne just sixteen. In a letter written immediately after Browne's death, FitzGerald recalled how deeply moved he had been when, on the morning after he had conversed for a while with Browne on the steamer from Bristol, he met him again in the Tenby boarding house where they had both taken quarters and how Browne, with a chalk mark from playing billiards on his face, had seemed to him then like someone he had missed for goodness knew how long. In the years that followed that first meeting in Wales, Browne and FitzGerald often visited each other in Suffolk or Bedfordshire, driving cross-country in a gig or rambling over the fields, lunching at inns, watching the clouds as they drifted eastward, and perhaps feeling the wing of time brush their temples. A little riding, driving, eating, drinking etc. (not forgetting smoke) fill up the day, FitzGerald wrote. Browne would have his fishing rods with him, his shotgun, and watercolour requisites, whilst FitzGerald would take a book which he scarcely read because he could not take his eyes off his friend. We do not know whether he allowed himself, then or at any other time, to ponder the nature of the desire that moved him, but his constant anxiety for Browne's health was in itself indicative of the depth of his passion. For FitzGerald, Browne was the personification of an ideal, but for that very reason he seemed overshadowed by mortality from the start, and prompted fears in FitzGerald that
perhaps he will not be long to be looked at. For there are signs of decay about him. Browne's subsequent marriage did not change the feelings FitzGerald had for him in the slightest, but instead confirmed his obscure intuition that he would not be able to keep him and that his friend was destined for an early death. The love which FitzGerald probably never dared to declare was not expressed until he wrote his letter of condolence to Browne's widow, who doubtless laid his curious communication aside in amazement if not consternation. FitzGerald was in his fiftieth year when he lost Browne. From then on he withdrew increasingly within himself. He had long been refusing his mother's regular invitations to her sumptuous dinner parties in London, because to his mind the ritual of communal dining was the most abominable of Society's abominations, and now he also forwent his occasional visits to the capital's galleries and concert halls, only in exceptional instances venturing beyond his immediate circle of friends. I think I shall shut myself up in the remotest nook of Suffolk and let my beard grow, he wrote, and would doubtless have done just that, had he not become disaffected with that region too, where a new breed of land-owners were working the soil for all it could yield. They are felling all the trees, he complained, and tearing up the hedgerows. Soon the birds will not know where to go. One copse after another is vanishing, the grassy wayside banks where in the spring the cow-slips and violets bloomed have been ploughed up and levelled, and if one now takes the path from Bredfield to Hasketon, which was once so delightful, it is like crossing a desert. Given the aversion that FitzGerald had had since childhood to his own class, the ruthless exploitation of the land, the obsession with private
property, which was pursued by means increasingly dubious, and the ever more radical restriction of common rights, were profoundly abhorrent to him. And so, he said, I get to the water: where no friends are buried nor Pathways stopt up. From 1860, FitzGerald