THE LIFE OF EDWARD FITZGERALD —Alfred McKinley Terhune—Yale ($5).
In London one day in 1861 Poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his great friend, Poet Algernon Swinburne, rummaging through the penny book box at Bookseller Quaritch's, made a sensational "find" — the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam rendered into English by an anonymous translator. "Next day," Swinburne reported crossly, "when we returned for more [copies], the price was raised to the iniquitous and exorbitant sum of twopence. You should have heard . . . the . . . impressive severity of Gabriel's humorous expostulations with [Mr. Quaritch], on behalf of a defrauded if limited public."
The Rubaiyat caught on quickly. But its translator still remained unknown. Harvard's Charles Eliot Norton, who introduced this Rubaiyat to the U.S., showed it to crusty Historian Thomas Carlyle, remarking that it was rumored to be the work of a "Rev. Edward FitzGerald, who lived somewhere in Norfolk and spent much time in his boat." Cried Carlyle: "Why, he's no more Reverend than I am! He's a very old friend of mine . . . and [he] might have spent his time to much better purpose than in busying himself with the verses of that old Mohammedan blackguard."
No Lion. This biography by Syracuse University Professor Terhune is the best documented life to date of Victorian England's least-documented poet. "Fitz," a lifelong friend of Carlyle, Thackeray and Tennyson, came of a rich and ancient family, was able to shape his life about as he wished it. He did not wish to become a literary lion. "Tell Thackeray," he wrote firmly to a friend at the age of 21, "that he is never to invite me to his house, as I never intend to go. ... I am going to become a great bear; and have got all sorts of Utopian ideas. . . . These may all be very absurd, but I try the experiment on myself, so I can do no great hurt."
His Utopian experiment consisted chiefly in following the Wordsworthian principles of "plain living and high thinking." Shunning his parents' wealthy house, FitzGerald rented a small cottage in Suffolk, where he lived for 16 years with a dog, a cat and a parrot. His staple diet was bread, fruit, cheese and fish, his recreations walking and sailing, his routine "of an even, grey-paper character." "He [lives]," complained one of his friends, "in a state of disgraceful indifference to everything, except grass and fresh air. . . . Half the self-sacrifice . . . the moral resolution, which he exercises . . . would amply furnish forth a martyr or a missionary. His tranquillity is like a pirated copy of the peace of God."
When his admirers called him "Philosopher" ("Diogenes without his dirt," said one), FitzGerald retorted that he had merely "a talent for dullness." He rose early, spent his mornings reading "old books" and doing occasional writing; in the afternoon he casually drew and painted. Evenings, he smoked, played the spinet, and entertained a few local callers. "Day follows day with unvaried movement," he declared; "there is the same level meadow with geese upon it always lying before my eyes: the same pollard oaks: with now and then the butcher or the washerwoman trundling by. . . ."