It’s All Leigh Hunt’s Fault (Or Why I Read)                   

It all really got out of hand in Junior High, the penchant for reading, though of course I had been grappling with the addiction since early childhood. 

An adored seventh grade teacher read us Leigh Hunt’s rhythmic and nicely quatrained paean to chivalry, “The Glove and Lion." The poem tells of a haughty damsel who throws her glove into the lion’s den to test the valor of a particular knight, and several neat stanzas later thus it culminates: he threw the glove but not with love right in the lady’s face.  Wow. It doesn't get any better than that for a seventh grader enraptured with high romance, rhythmic, rhyming poetry and allusions to knights and ladies and lions. Later on in college, having already begun the chosen course of study, I learned that love also may have something to do with a “lady in the mead,” men who are occasionally “alone and palely loitering” (innocently or not), abject misery and  diaphanous creatures who “walk in beauty like the night,” inspiring us all to become dazed though well turned out insomniacs. The settings could very well involve “starry climes.”

So while following my own starry climb through a major in English, I continued to learn all sorts of interesting and weird things about dashing, romantic and flamboyant poets themselves, some of the information quite paradoxical to the romantic idea, if not downright unsettling. More curiously, the dates of names and settings in some of the novels written during the period often were indicated by blank lines. So when Leigh Hunt for example scavenged for his best buddy Percy B---- Shelly’s heart in a hastily arranged funeral pyre on the sands of ---- in Italy in the year 18 ----, the term “romantic” finally entered the twilight zone of any possible suspension of disbelief. It was Hunt, you see, who took possession of Shelley’s heart at the funeral pyre on the beach, refusing to return it to Mary Shelley. Now, how could anyone of reasonable mind who accepts that beauty is truth- truth beauty and that is all we (and ye) need to know, reconcile this ghoulish act with the same sensibility that penned the perfect, lilting and light-as-a-feather rondeau, “Jenny Kissed Me” (Jumping from the chair she sat in . . . .)?

Easy. Nothing is ever what it appears to be.

Here’s Hunt's playful verse:

Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in:
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,
Jenny kissed me.

Yes, the heart fetishist was capable of whimsy too;  but he was not necessarily being chivalrous here. Jenny, often regarded by readers as perhaps an enthusiastic, spontaneous child or charming young woman, actually is generally believed by scholars to have been a grown up, not a girl, or maybe a sort of girl, but a pal’s wife,  and alas (no pun) a bit of a downer (and can we blame her?); apparently Hunt actually did not care for very much. . . . So he was jesting you see, using his pen for mild satire. But as the centuries sped, this eternal ditty was repeatedly taught in middle and high school as if it were a classic tribute to the unchecked and ebullient, spontaneity of innocent, childish, romantic action. This stuff just feeds on itself.

I picture Hunt, tall, imposing, enshrouded in grief and a long, dark cloak, not bothered by the environmental nastiness of the burning flesh,-very much in keeping with his early Zen leanings by the way- a fearless, charismatic and egotistical journalist, father to far too many progeny, poet and ersatz radical often described as “a child” himself in the ways of the world- oblivious to all but his own sense of mourning and loss coupled with a strange desire to hold onto something tangible and warm amid the flames that was once beating in the breast of his dear friend.

Was Leigh Hunt jealous of Shelley? Was he fueling his own poetic grandiosity with a gruesome, though historically unbeatable gesture? Why did he give Mary Shelley such a hard time about returning the organ? In fact, Hunt even had someone else burn a hand fishing out the valentine from that simmering mound of literary campfire then pass it back over to Hunt, proving that he was not entirely out of his senses after all with overwhelming grief. 

Let’s face it. Shelley’s demise was gruesome enough, nearly post-modern in fact in its grim portrayal of depraved obsession gone terribly, terribly wrong, yet still so relevant in its eerie suggestion of twentieth century cinematic imagery. He simply should have brought the darn boat back to shore when he knew there were hints of a terrible storm. After the tragic event, the famous poet’s body was thrown back to land minus parts ravaged by sea urchins, not a very romantic vision. At that point you could say he even was in worse shape than his beloved Ozymandius, and it all really did seem more depressing and gothic than romantic, although there may be no contradiction here. Yet addicts for romance continue to revere the antics of fast living, reckless literary heroes and plod through the poetry with a longing for places like Xanadu, haunted by visions of mutability, restless clouds and the transient nature of existence.

Romanticism-  the root of all folly! 

Shelley was only in his twenties when he refused to bring that little skiff back to the safety of dry land and decided instead to take a leap into immortality, an arrogant, son-of-gentility early hippie, gifted womanizer and giant ego. Think of what a monster he might have become had he lived!  He no doubt would have grown as corpulent as Byron and silly as Falstaff, besotted with epicurean and sybaritic pleasures. If he had lived in the twenty-first century he would be hang gliding in perilously cloudy skies, playing havoc quite recklessly with baby drones, rock climbing on crumbling peaks, or careening stupidly along on motorcycles way past his prime and continuing to write inaccessible poetry with far too many mythical allusions.

Who were the Romantics in truth, and why am I so still entranced and obsessed by the thought of them? Look at all the time I just spent on the escapades of the Byron/Shelley/Keats gang for example. Wildly imaginative, bright and mischievous, unstoppable, attention-crazy, a tad violence-prone, manipulative, talented , sex crazed with a limitless and seductive capacity for gorgeous bullshit-  in other words, a short synopsis of western culture encapsulated in an idea that was put into serious motion by a small though somewhat radical group of writers, whose time had come in the latter part of the eighteenth century.

And so as a result of the machinations of a few early spinners of fairly tales, a slew of romantic poetry and many novels to follow, and the similar outpourings of highly emotional scribblers from long, long ago as well as the recent past, my life got off to a rocky and precarious start and stayed that way. I was hooked, plain and simple. This was true at least from the time I was old enough to march my small, elementary school legs to the local library each week and lug home as many collections of fairy tales from the children’s section as the kindly though at times severe librarians would allow. Actually, they allowed six, that was the rule, but all the volumes were hard cover, many of them thick and heavy, always smelling deliciously of ink, varnished wood, hints of citrus, oak, lemon and previous use with a smooth finish, and all kinds of magic and mystery. During the long walk home I could savor the imminent unraveling of each incredible story to come. 

Later on I switched to Robert Louis Stevenson, and even eventually to the lesser known but tremendously swashbuckling Rafael Sabatini - I was completely out of control by then. What a romantic name that was! Rafael Sabatini. . .  his literary escapades were made-  perhaps even written-  for the silver screen and the likes of a Captain Blood,  played by Errol Flynn in a silly pageboy hairdo traversing windy masts in grainy black and white; thankfully I did not know about that movie at the time. Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters were waiting exultantly in the wings and certainly would keep me busy for a while. Let's face it, the stock of tales was endless. You could not live long enough to read it all!

In a world before Sesame Street, Baby Einstein and Curious George, computers, smart phones, instant knowledge, delayed wisdom, virtual reality and reality shows, facebook, nook books, twitter, twaddle, the arrival of book clubs en masse and for every taste, ubiquitous screens with all kinds of fulfilling misinformation, before all that, readers settled for what they could get their starving and curious little paws on. 

So how did you become an avid reader?