'I’ll Have at You With Hip and Haw'

Imagine John Keats as a novelist. Whose fiction might his have most resembled? He is certainly as witty as Jane Austen, his senior by twenty years, but her world is likely too narrow and feminine for the poet, too bounded by manners and morals. Please don’t suggest George Eliot, born fifteen months before Keats’ death. Dickens is closer, for his humor and linguistic extravagance, but his pathological sentimentality removes him from consideration. Fielding or Smollett? Perhaps, especially the latter with his rowdy, cruel, knock-about sense of comedy. But my best guess is Sterne, dead twenty-seven years before Keats’ birth. 

Keats’ letters, his supreme contribution to world literature, are rich in bawdy. Keats was not the ethereal milquetoast beatified by earlier generations. We know he was treated for syphilis. And he liked a well-told dirty joke. Keats left no critical judgment of Tristram Shandy or A Sentimental Journey, but we know he read at least the former. He describes his friend Thomas Richards – like Keats, the son of a livery stable-keeper – as “Shandean.” In the September 1819 letter to his brother and sister-in-law, George and Georgiana Keats, Keats writes:  

 

“I feel I can bear real ills better than imaginary ones. Whenever I find myself growing vapourish, I rouse myself, wash and put on a clean shirt brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoestrings neatly and in fact adonize as I were going out – then all clean and comfortable I sit down to write.”

 

The passage recalls another in Book IX, Chap. XIII of Tristram Shandy:

 

“—I never stand conferring with pen and ink one moment; for if a pinch of snuff, or a stride or two across the room will not do the business for me—I take a razor at once; and having tried the edge of it upon the palm of my hand, without further ceremony, except that of first lathering my beard, I shave it off; taking care only if I do leave a hair, that it be not a grey one: this done, I change my shirt—put on a better coat—send for my last wig—put my topaz ring upon my finger; and in a word, dress myself from one end to the other of me, after my best fashion.”

 

Keats’ letters are peppered with unannounced allusions to many writers, Shakespeare in particular. Another editor, in the passage cited above, hears an echo of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy – a book Keats owned and annotated. Best of all, in a letter written on this date, March 14, in 1818, to John Hamilton Reynolds, Keats ventriloquizes Tristram Shandy’s Uncle Toby, a retired army captain obsessed with military tactics and fortifications:

 

“I’ll cavern you, and grotto you, and waterfall you, and wood you, and water you, and immense-rock you, and tremendous-sound you, and solitude you. I’ll make a lodgment on your glacis by a row of Pines, and storm your covered way with bramble Bushes. I’ll have at you with hip and haw small-shot, and cannonade you with Shingles—I’ll be witty upon salt-fish, and impede your cavalry with clotted cream.”

 

Keats’ imagination was playful and capable of endearing whimsy. Let’s put aside Keats the solemn cherub.