"SPLENDID
TWADDLE": O'NEILL AND RICHARD MIDDLETON
Rereading
Agnes Boulton's Part of a
Long
Story (Doubleday: Garden City, N.Y.: 1958), I came across a
reference which eventually led me to the basement of the university
library, there to poke around the bins of unshelved, uncalled for,
and forgotten books. In the fall of 1917, Agnes recalled, Eugene
O'Neill "often carried in his pocket a small blue volume of
poems "which really dramatized something of himself as he was
then" (pp. 61-62). "He would read and quote these poems
often," Agnes wrote. "It disturbed me because I began to
wonder which was Gene and which was the poem--was it that the poem
expressed him and what he felt? Or had he read the poem and from it
created an image of himself?.... These poems of Richard Middleton's-how
many people know about them, or read them now?" (p. 62).
Richard
Middleton? Indeed, a forgotten name. Who was he? What kinds of poems
had he produced? Was he undeservedly forgotten? What manner of
influence had he had on the young, impressionable O'Neill? After a
lengthy search I found that "small blue volume of poems"
at the bottom of a dusty bin; intrigued, I set out to discover what
I could about its author.
A
few years older than O'Neill, Middleton was a lonely soul who
yearned for literary recognition. Alas, the description Joyce gives
of Tristan Tzara in Tom Stoppard's Travesties would have fit
him wonderfully: "an over-excited little man with a need for
self-expression far beyond the scope of (his) natural gifts."1
Apparently Middleton found it easier to affect the manner,
dress, and mores of a London poet than to actually produce the art
for which he might have been remembered. His Edwardian childhood,
spent in fashionable despondency, was given over almost entirely to
solitude and moping. The main event of these early years, according
to the poet's own account, was probably a bout with measles which
afforded him a paradisal interlude from contact with the boys at
school who taunted him.2
Adolescence was, of course, a nightmare. Then, in his early
twenties Richard was placed for a short while in the office of a
business corporation--which, quite, predictably, he abandoned for
Bohemia. The remainder of his life was an extended literary cliché.
Encountering Middleton in a cafe during this period, the critic
Arthur Ransome characterized his poetry and conversation as
"twaddle, but such downright, spirited splendid twaddle, flung
out from the heart of him in a grand, careless way that made me
think of largesse scattered royally on a mob."3
What
followed in due course were years of alcohol, carousing, brief
affairs, poverty, much verse--and dark, intractable obscurity. The
end came on December 1, 1911 when Middleton, aged twenty-nine,
poured chloroform over a handkerchief, covered his face, and
permanently went to bed. What weighed most heavily on Middleton's
mind, according to Henry Savage, his friend and humorless
biographer, was "love, poverty and neuralgia."4
More likely the main motive for Middleton's suicide was the
hope of posthumous fame. Indeed, to complete the romantic scenario,
his works (unmarketable during his lifetime) were actually in print
within a year. The books were published in London by T. Fisher Unwin
and ran to five volumes, all bound in blue buckram and lettered on
back and front in gilt. One of these surely was the volume of poems
mentioned by Agnes Boulton. In 1917 O'Neill had discovered Middleton
at the height of the poet's brief span of popularity.
Today
Middleton is no longer read--and for very good reasons. His poems,
like his life, unfortunately are indulgent, derivative, selfcentered,
melodramatic, and at times unintentionally comic. What O'Neill found
to admire in them is difficult to discern. In his finest moments
Middleton could offer a dreamy, pseudo-Keatsian melodic line, as in
"The Last Serenade":
Be
silent now, oh moon, and be you dumb,
Oh too importunate stars! I will not hear
Your dulcet tales that make my senses numb
With easeless longing. .
.
.
And
no doubt O'Neill, recollecting his sailing adventures, was stirred
by the romanticism of "The Last Cruise":
The
stars were out overhead, and 'Lo!' I cried, 'Nevermore,
Nevermore shall the palace know me;' and high on the masts
The white sails trembled as skyward the good ship bore
Her cargo of shadows.
Never a word of regret as I stood on her moonlight poop
And sang not of old past things but of wonders to be;
And saw great birds with a glory of plumage swoop
Down the sea's meadows.
After
all, Edmund speaks in similar accents in Act IV of Long Day's Journey Into Night.
But
the majority of Middleton's poems are dull and silly and eminently
worthy of oblivion. Like Edmund, Richard may have had "the
makings of a poet," but he lacked the skill and genius to
develop. His favorite themes recur with numbing regularity and
include the idealization of dreamers, children, starry nights,
Bohemia, Bacchus, fame, pain, love, fate, early death, and--most
insistently--himself.
My
name is Richard Middleton, I'm living in Blackfriars,
Two stories up, above the street, to chasten my desires;
I have no purple heather here, no field, nor living tree-
But every night when I look out, God lights the stars for me.
("In
Blackfriars")
Only
with dead or dying children could he identify completely. After his
own sorrows, they were his favorite subjects, and his poems
("Dorothy," for instance) abound with the patter-patter of
little ghostly footsteps. On brighter days the poet's chief
happiness lay in picturing his eventual canonization and (in
comtemplation of that event) anticipating the pleasures of old age.
In
the brave year nineteen fifty
Though our sun is down the sky,
May we show the world together
That Bohemia does not die.
Though our songs are sung by pirates
And our names are in Who's Who-
May I wander to this tavern
And renew my youth with you.
("In
the Brave Year Nineteen Fifty")
But
more often Middleton grappled with his anonymity and suffered the
pangs of unrequited love. In this mood he was forever visualizing
his own death and consoling himself with the conviction that after
he was gone (and all his words in print) the world would surely miss
him.
Love
brought a pretty girl to me,
But when she saw that I was fat,
She cried, 'My heart, can such things be!'
And then she laid me flat
And used me as a mat.
My
flesh is worn, my heart is bruised,
The thing I had to say is said,
And all my senses are confused;
They'll soon put me in bed
And say 'Hullo! he's dead!'
("Life
and Love")
The
girl in question, though she had not seen Middleton for more than a
year, on hearing of his suicide wrote to Mr. Savage a long and tearstained
letter professing that the news caused her to fall in a dead faint,
but that she would "be ever so pleased if you will kindly send
me the names of the publishers where his books are to be published
that I may buy them. I cannot write more now because I am too upset.
Kindly write soon and give me all the details."5
Middleton
would have been pleased. He would have been pleased, too by the
extravagant eulogies his friends poured forth on the occasion of his
death. Minor poets throughout England rose to pluck their lyres in
tribute to the fallen Adonais. William Kean Seymour addressed him as
a "Dreamer with Love's roses on thy brow/ Entwined with bitter
sprays of mournful yew" ("Richard Middleton: In Memoriam"),
and Mr. Arthur Coles Armstrong immortalized him as "He of the
straggled beard, the Vulcan frame,/ The tender voice, the ego
undefiled" ("With Richard Middleton Along the Dover
Road"). Finally, he was apostrophized as follows by W. R.
Titterton:
