Talk, Talk, Talk

The lives of most of the writers I most admire are as bottomlessly interesting as their work. Why is that? Am I simply prejudiced in their favor? Or are interesting works likelier to be created by complex, conflicted and, thus, interesting personalities? Placidity of temperament, after all, is admirable but seldom interesting. Or am I simply projecting my own weaknesses and small virtues into others? I don’t know the answers, though I know I feel consolation and kinship in the lives of writers I revere – Samuel Johnson, Thoreau, Henry James and Beckett, among others. I see no obvious pattern in my pantheon. They form no school, share no philosophy and seem to have little in common (an Englishman, American, American-turned-Englishman, Irishman-turned-Frenchman) but the gift for writing memorable English prose.

Then there are the writers whose lives are more interesting than most or all of their work. Chief among them, for me, is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I prize a handful of the poems and especially his Biographia Literaria. His prose, steeped in Burton and Browne, and looking forward to Melville’s in Moby-Dick, is very heady stuff. But it’s Coleridge the man, the opium addict and wayward philosopher, the dutiful father and embattled friend – as chronicled in Richard Holmes’ great biography – that compels me to return to “Dejection: An Ode” and the notebooks and letters.

By every account, Coleridge was a voluminous, spellbinding talker. Put another way, he was a blowhard, but a blowhard who, at his best, could enchant and edify an audience. Seamus Perry has compiled, in S.T. Coleridge: Interviews and Recollection (2000), an anthology of reminiscences written by men and women who knew the poet. Nearly all of them comment upon – satirically or in admiring wonder – the unstaunched flow of his conversation, and many note its resemblance to his published prose. The book recalls a volume published in 1940, Coleridge the Talker, edited by Richard W. Armour and Raymond F. Howes. Many anecdotes can be found in both books. Here’s Thomas Carlyle:

“Nothing could be more copious than his talk; and furthermore it was always, virtually or literally, of the nature of a monologue; suffering no interruption, however reverent; hastily putting aside all foreign additions, annotations, or most ingenuous desires for elucidation, as well-meant superfluities, which would never do.”

On Christmas Day 1832, Ralph Waldo Emerson began his 10-month Grand Tour of Europe. Among others, he met Wordsworth, Carlyle, Mill and Landor. Here’s an excerpt from his disapproving account of meeting Coleridge, who was 60 years old and two years away from his death. Emerson was 29:

“I was in his company for about an hour, but find it impossible to recall the largest part of his discourse, which was often like so many printed paragraphs in his book, -- perhaps the same, -- so readily did he fall into certain commonplaces. As I might as foreseen, the visit was rather a spectacle than a conversation, of no use beyond the satisfaction of my curiosity. He was old and preoccupied, and could not bend to a new companion and think with him.”

The poet Thomas Moore, best known for “Lalla Rookh,” dined with Coleridge in 1833 and reported on “the continuous drawl of his preachment.”

Five years earlier, the creator of Natty Bumpo, James Fenimore Cooper, also met Coleridge, who delivered his pet theory that the Odyssey and the Iliad were not the work of one man, Homer, but had been written by many poets:

“It was not a discourse, but a dissertation. Scarcely any one spoke besides Mr. Coleridge….and I might say no one could speak. At moments he was surprisingly eloquent, though a little discursive [!], and the whole time he appeared to be perfectly the master of his subject and of his language. As near as I could judge, he was rather more than and hour in possession of the floor, almost without interruption.”

A painter and art critic, Robert Benjamin Haydon, said Coleridge spoke “in his chanting way, half-poetical, half-inspired, half-idiotic,” without leaving out any of the poet’s three halves. About a much younger Coleridge, in 1807, we have an account by fellow opium connoisseur Thomas De Quincey:

“….Coleridge, like some great river, the Orellana, or St. Lawrence, that, having been checked and fretted by rocks or thwarting islands, suddenly recovers its volume of waters and its mighty music, swept at once, as if returning to his natural business, into a continuous strain of eloquent dissertation, certainly the most novel, the most finely illustrated, and traversing the most spacious fields of thought by transitions the most just and logical, that it was possible to conceive.”

It’s puzzling that I should find Coleridge’s loquaciousness so attractive. I admire people who can be simultaneously articulate and laconic. Perhaps I admire Coleridge’s efforts to articulate his ideas, but those ideas so often defy articulation. There’s something touchingly sad about so brilliant a man unable to distill his thoughts. Perhaps he equated silence with nothingness, or an end of speech with death itself. As the Ancient Mariner says of the “seraph-band”:

“No voice did they impart --
No voice; but oh! the silence sank
Like music on my heart.”

In 1968, Walter Jackson Bate published a brief life of Coleridge while planning a longer, definitive work. He found the poet’s suffering intolerable, and gave up the idea, explaining: "I couldn’t bear to live with him that long."