{"id":160304,"date":"2022-06-22T11:16:32","date_gmt":"2022-06-22T15:16:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=160304"},"modified":"2022-06-22T14:06:33","modified_gmt":"2022-06-22T18:06:33","slug":"re-covered-a-sultry-month-by-alethea-hayter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/06\/22\/re-covered-a-sultry-month-by-alethea-hayter\/","title":{"rendered":"Re-Covered: A Sultry Month<\/em> by Alethea Hayter"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Thames embankment, London, England. Photochrom Print Collection, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

One hundred and seventy-six years ago today, on the evening of Monday,\u00a0<\/span>June 22, 1846, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon\u2014sixty years old and facing imminent financial ruin\u2014locked himself in his studio in his house on Burwood Place, just off London\u2019s Edgware Road. The month had been the hottest anyone could remember: that day, thermometers in the city stood at ninety degrees in the shade. Despite the heat, that morning Haydon had walked to a gunmaker\u2019s on nearby Oxford Street and purchased a pistol. He spent the rest of the day at home, composing letters and writing a comprehensive, nineteen-clause will.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That evening, only a few streets away in Marylebone, Elizabeth Barrett penned a letter to her fianc\u00e9, Robert Browning. The poets\u2019 courtship was still a secret, but they wrote each other constantly, sometimes twice a day. Like everyone else, Elizabeth was exhausted by the weather; earlier in the month she had complained to Browning that she could do nothing but lie on her sofa, drink lemonade, and read <\/span>Monte Cristo<\/span><\/i>. \u201cAre we going to have a storm tonight?\u201d she now wrote eagerly. And, indeed, as dusk turned to darkness, the rumbles of a summer tempest began. By ten o\u2019clock, Londoners could see flashes of lightning on the horizon.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Back in Burwood Place, meanwhile, passing her husband\u2019s studio on her way upstairs to dress, Mrs. Mary Haydon tried the door, but found it bolted. \u201cWho\u2019s there?\u201d her husband cried out. \u201cIt is only me,\u201d she replied, before continuing on her way. A few minutes later, Haydon emerged from his studio and followed her upstairs. He repeated a message he wanted her to deliver to a friend of theirs across the river in Brixton and stayed a moment or two longer, then kissed her before heading back downstairs. Once again alone in his studio, he wrote one final page that began, \u201cLast Thoughts of B. R. Haydon. \u00bd past 10.\u201d Fifteen minutes later, he stood up, took the pistol he had bought that morning, and, standing in front of the large canvas of an unfinished current work in progress, “<\/span>Alfred and the First British Jury”<\/span>\u2014one of the grand historical scenes he favored but brought him few admirers\u2014shot himself in the head.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

His wife heard the noise but paid it no attention; she and her daughter Mary assumed the troops they\u2019d seen exercising earlier in nearby Hyde Park were shooting their weapons. Meanwhile, in the room below them, Haydon was fumbling to reload the pistol\u2014the bullet had reverberated off his skull rather than killing him outright. Injured as he was, he dropped the gun before he was able to discharge it a second time. Groping around in desperation, he grabbed a razor and slashed twice at his throat, before sinking to the floor, the grim deed finally done. Oblivious to the gory scene on the other side of the studio door she passed on her way downstairs, Mrs Haydon set off for Brixton about eleven o\u2019clock. When, an hour and a half later, Mary finally entered the studio, she found her father\u2019s dead body lying in a pool of blood that she first mistook to be red paint.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Outside, a torrential downpour assailed the London streets\u2014one woman slipped on the wet pavement, breaking her leg so badly surgeons had to amputate, while another suffered a fractured skull when a chimney pot came crashing down on her. The unbearable heat had finally broken.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

The sad events of this portentous night are the fulcrum of the British author Alethea Hayter\u2019s compelling group biography, <\/span>A Sultry Month<\/a>, <\/span><\/i>first published in 1965. The book opens four days earlier, on Thursday, June 18, 1846, with the arrival, at Barrett\u2019s home at Fifty Wimpole Street, of five pictures and three trunks, sent by Haydon to his friend by correspondence for safekeeping. As had happened on seven previous occasions in the past twenty-five years, Haydon feared he was about to be arrested for debt and his possessions about to be seized, so he was attempting to remove them from harm\u2019s way. The book draws to a close on Monday, July 13, the day Haydon was buried in Paddington New Churchyard. A tragic and rather pitiful figure during his lifetime\u2014\u201cAll his life he had utterly mistaken his vocation,\u201d wrote Dickens of Haydon, \u201che most unquestionably was a very bad painter\u201d\u2014the course of history has done little to change this. Yet in Hayter\u2019s clever and cunning hands, the story of his life\u2019s end, and the cast of characters caught up in it, whether through friendship or happenstance, makes for unexpectedly gripping reading.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s Barrett and Browning. She\u2019s still living at home with her domineering father, but the lovers are busy plotting their elopement, which will take place at the end of the summer. Meanwhile, in Chelsea, the Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane, are experiencing a period of marital strife, though they try their best to present a united front when they host the wealthy German novelist Ida Gr\u00e4fin von Hahn-Hahn: \u201c(Countess Cock-cock! What a name!) She is a sort of German George Sand <\/span>without the genius<\/span><\/i>,\u201d writes Jane in a letter to her cousin. The author of the popular semiautobiographical novel, <\/span>The Countess Faustina <\/span><\/i>(1841), about the romantic escapades of a sexually adventurous countess traveling through Asia, Hahn-Hahn was the toast of London literati. And while everyone\u2019s rather disappointed to discover that she\u2019s no great beauty, with false teeth and only one eye, they\u2019re downright shocked when they realize her gentleman escort is actually her lover. Hayter\u2019s protagonists might be liberal-minded for their era, but they\u2019re still Victorians! A further list of supporting players includes the banker and poet Samuel Rogers and the Irish art historian Mrs. Jameson, a close friend and confidant of Barrett\u2019s\u2014not to mention Dickens, Keats, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, who make\u00a0cameo appearances.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the houses of Parliament, meanwhile, the government is embroiled in heated discussions about the Corn Laws. These were high tariffs on imported grain that were supposedly meant to encourage domestic production of corn, but actually just kept the prices exorbitantly high. This benefited already wealthy landowners but was increasingly ruinous for both the working classes, who struggled to afford to eat, and for merchants and manufacturers, who lost business because their patrons were forced to spend such a huge portion of their income on grain. The failed harvests across the UK and the potato famine in Ireland forced the prime minister, Robert Peel, to bend to the increasingly loud call from the British population, and on Thursday<\/span>, June 25, the Corn Laws were repealed. This resulted in a backlash from the landowners of Peel\u2019s Conservative government, and a week later he was forced to resign from office due to lack of support in the party.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Hayter\u2019s London is a hotbed of political and personal crises, captured at a moment of great transition: Hampstead, for example, is still a village reached by walking through open fields\u2014Haydon makes the journey himself only the day before he dies\u2014as yet to be swallowed by the metropolis as it belches outwards. But with the construction of the new Birmingham railway line from Euston, along which the “tentacles\u201d of Camden Town stretch out into the fields, this growth is beginning.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And permeating the book is the heat, the atmosphere of fervor and foment that only heightens as the mercury climbs up the barometers. \u201cOh\u2014it is so hot,\u201d Elizabeth Barrett writes to Browning early in the month. \u201cThere is a thick mist lacquered over with light\u2014it is cauldron-heat, rather than fire-heat.\u201d This wasn\u2019t languid summer sun; these were temperatures that were \u201cmurderous.\u201d Wherrymen died of sunstroke, farm laborers perished from heatstroke, numerous people drowned while bathing; there was cholera in the cities of Hull and Leeds and typhus outbreaks in London; grass singed and scorched in the fields, fires broke out in houses across the city, and the stink from the sewers rose in a heavy miasma. It\u2019s both visceral and metaphorical: Haydon\u2019s spiralling descent into despair, Barrett and Browning\u2019s increasingly passionate correspondence, even the Carlyles\u2019 hot and bothered bickering; they\u2019re all infused with a sense of fevered, infernal frenzy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

A Sultry Month<\/span><\/i> possesses many of the ingredients of a great novel\u2014from the urgency of its pace and plot, to the intimate understanding of and access to its protagonists\u2014but it\u2019s actually a painstakingly researched and meticulously constructed act of literary collage. Most significantly, nothing in these pages has been invented. \u201cEvery incident, every sentence of dialogue, every gesture, the food, the flowers, the furniture, all are taken from the contemporary letters, diaries and reminiscences of the men and women concerned,\u201d Hayter confirms in her foreword. She had no need to invent anything because all the material was already there for the taking\u2014\u201cnearly all\u201d of her subjects were \u201cprofessional writers with formidable memories and highly trained descriptive skills.\u201d All she had to do was choose what was interesting or relevant, and then organize it into a single, cohesive, chronological narrative.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In \u201cA House of One\u2019s Own,\u201d her brilliant essay on the perennial allure of that most famous of all London-based literary and artistic circles, the Bloomsbury Group, Janet Malcolm declares that the collective\u2019s most canny achievement \u201cwas that they placed in posterity\u2019s hands the documents necessary to engage posterity\u2019s feeble attention.\u201d It\u2019s these\u2014letters, memoirs, and journals\u2014and only these, she continues, \u201cthat reveal inner life and compel the sort of helpless empathy that fiction compels.\u201d These artifacts inspire a particular fascination\u2014and often inspire the biographer. But this initial \u201crapture of firsthand encounters with another\u2019s lived experience\u201d is, as Malcolm laments, rarely present in the resultant biography, which usually \u201cfunctions as a kind of processing plant where experience is converted into information the way fresh produce is converted into canned vegetables.\u201d Hayter was no stranger to the traditional biographer\u2019s method; in 1962 she published the acclaimed <\/span>Mrs. Browning: A Poet\u2019s Work and Its Setting<\/span><\/i>. But, circling around the same subject in the years that followed, and having assembled a rich cache of material of the kind whose magnetism Malcolm exhorts\u2014those \u201cletters, diaries and reminiscences\u201d that Hayter references above\u2014she took an inspired and radically different approach. When it came to writing <\/span>A Sultry Month<\/span><\/i>,<\/span>\u00a0she let this original material speak for itself, and thus managed to deliver exactly the \u201crapture\u201d of those encounters with \u201canother\u2019s lived experience\u201d of which Malcolm speaks.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Although then \u201ca form which is so new as to lack a name,\u201d as Anthony Burgess put it when he hailed <\/span>A Sultry Month<\/span><\/i> as a \u201cmasterpiece,\u201d this kind of biography of a microcosm\u2014a personal history that is tethered to a specific place, moment or other organizing factor\u2014is ubiquitous today. (We need only think of<\/span> Phyllis Rose\u2019s <\/span>Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages <\/span><\/i>(1983), which, incidentally, revisits the Carlyles\u2019 union; Jenny Uglow\u2019s <\/span>The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World <\/span><\/i>(2002); and most recently, Francesca Wade\u2019s <\/span>Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars <\/span><\/i>(2020), to name just a few of the best examples that have appeared in the years since <\/span>A Sultry Month<\/span><\/i>\u2019s publication.) Hayter\u2019s precision, concision, and sharp narrative thrust still distinguish the book today, but it\u2019s hard to comprehend just how groundbreaking <\/span>A Sultry Month<\/span><\/i>\u00a0felt to readers in the mid-’60s. Its publication marked the dawn of a whole new kind of life writing.<\/span><\/p>\n

Though Hayter\u2019s subjects were historical, in order to tell their stories, she drew inspiration from one of the most cutting-edge artistic techniques of her day. \u201cMy object\u2014like that of the Pop Artist who combines scraps of Christmas cards, of cinema posters and of the Union Jack to make a picture\u2014has been to create a pattern from a group of familiar objects,\u201d she explains. In the same way that pop artists like Robert Rauschenberg or Jasper Johns constructed their work by repurposing and repositioning images\u2014or parts of images\u2014created by others, Hayter wrote by recycling material that would be already \u201cfamiliar to any student of the period.\u201d The originality of her project lies in the composition: she desired \u201cto show a set of authors\u2014all of whom have had their separate portraits painted many times at full length\u2014as a conversation piece of equals, existing in relationship to each other at a particular moment, encapsulated with one dramatic event in an overheated political and physical climate.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Hayter apparently loved gossip, a proclivity that served <\/span>A Sultry Month<\/span><\/i> well. Poking around in the letters and private papers of her subjects gave her \u201cthe sensation of being an inquisitive housemaid.\u201d Reading the finished book gives the delicious impression of listening at doors or catching snatches of conversation on the stairs\u2014an effect of the close attention Hayter pays to the full range of trifles and trivialities that constitute her subjects\u2019 lives. Jane Carlyle, we learn, never quite forgave Browning for clumsily burning a hole in her carpet with a hot teakettle; Barrett walks her beloved golden cocker spaniel, Flush, along Wimpole Street in the relative cool of the evening, her eyes peeled for dog stealers; the Carlyles are tormented by constipation because they refuse to eat any fresh fruit or vegetables. By means of such inclusions, Hayter<\/span> reminds us that the marrow of life is found in its minutiae, and in her alchemical hands, dusty historical figures are transformed into once-living and breathing beings with the same foibles and fears as the rest of us.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lucy Scholes is senior editor at McNally Editions.<\/em><\/main><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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