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Poetic Bowels. To his friends, "Old Fitz" was both a ruthlessly honest critic and a warmhearted patron. Tennyson, who was a proud man, as well as crotchety and hypochondriacal, readily accepted from FitzGerald unwavering criticism and hundreds of pounds. "This really great man," said FitzGerald, "thinks more about his bowels and nerves than about the Laureate wreath he was born to inherit." He was almost as observing about himself: "I know that I could write volume after volume as well as others of the mob of gentlemen who write with ease; but ... I have not the strong inward call, nor cruel-sweet pangs of parturition, that prove the birth of anything bigger than a mouse."
In 1853, when FitzGerald was 44, he published, at his own expense, his translation of six works by Spanish Playwright Calderon (which the Athenaeum considered "quite unnecessary to treat as a serious work"). Then a friend introduced him to what FitzGerald dubbed "the Sweetmeat, Childish, Oriental World" of the Persian language. Three years later, he braved the critics with a rendition of the Persian poem, Salaman and Absal.
By then, too, FitzGerald had begun to wonder if his lonely, esthetical life were not a huge mistake—"[a] seedy dullness ... a ... total failure and mess." He proceeded to complete the mess by marrying a gaunt Sunday-school teacher. "Lucy Barton," says tactful Biographer Terhune, "was doubtless attractive; but she lacked physical charm." "I am going to be married —don't congratulate me," the bridegroom told a friend. He turned up at church in "an old slouch hat," spoke only once at the wedding breakfast. Offered some blanc mange, he waved it away, muttering "Ugh! Congealed bridesmaid."
Chamber of Horrors. Lucy FitzGerald chose to live in London, in a house whose front windows looked out on a zoo, the back windows on a cemetery. The dim living room was papered in dark green—a "chamber of horrors," groaned Poet FitzGerald, "[in which my wife looks] like Lucretia Borgia." FitzGerald found "a sort of consolation" in "some curious Infidel and Epicurean Tetrastichs by a Persian of the Eleventh Century—as Savage against Destiny ... as Manfred—but mostly of Epicurean Pathos of this kind —'Drink—for the Moon will often come round to look for us in this Garden and find us not.'" After a few moons, his marriage collapsed. Two years later the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam* appeared and presently became (with the exception of the King James version of the Bible) the most popular translation in English.
FitzGerald returned to his Suffolk solitude, where he wrote his little-known translations of Aeschylus and Sophocles. As he aged, he became one of the county sights—a "tall, sad-faced elderly gentleman ... in an ill-fitting suit. . . blue spectacles on nose and an old cape. . . ." He lived to see his Rubaiyat become famous, but died (1883) a couple of decades before its fame became "a mania which swept the world" and posed a literary question that still engrosses Rubaiyat lovers : How much of Omar is Omar and how much is FitzGerald?