Word: chatterton
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This prototype of the self-annihilating artist seems yet another casualty of the rock culture; in fact, Thomas Chatterton perished in a London garret in 1770. Pondering the tragedy, William Wordsworth labeled him "the marvellous boy," and Samuel Johnson burbled, "It is wonderful how the whelp has written such things." Not all the appraisal was so rhapsodic. Horace Walpole called Chatterton "an instance that a complete genius and a complete rogue can be formed before a man is of age." Genius because Chatterton's verses were so prodigious, rogue because the young poet once wrote in an archaic style, artificially...
Ambition and false identity, suicide and posthumous fame: these are the ingredients of high romance, and it is no wonder that investigators periodically ransack the material of Chatterton's brief career. The latest is Briton Peter Ackroyd, 38, biographer of T.S. Eliot and a novelist who specializes in the blending of history and imagination. In Hawksmoor he shuttled between the 18th century and the present. Chatterton ventures deeper ! into the time warp. It unfolds in contemporary England, concludes in the late 1700s and dallies in the Victorian epoch when an artist named Henry Wallis painted a dramatic portrait...
...Dickensian tradition, and so does Ackroyd. The protagonist of his crowded and exuberant novel is another cursed poet, Charles Wychwood. One afternoon he comes across an old painting showing the marvellous boy as a middle-aged man. Curious, he begins to pore over some obscure manuscripts. They suggest that Chatterton faked his early death, then continued to write more verse under more assumed names, among them William Blake and Thomas Gray. "The greatest plagiarist in history?" inquires a colleague. "No!" Wychwood argues. "He was the greatest poet in history...
Louis was only 49 when he died of lung cancer in 1962, and his early death made him the Thomas Chatterton of formalism, the "marvelous boy," dying just as his genius was ready to blossom. He owes his reputation to the critic Clement Greenberg, who was also his coach. It is not really true, as has often been said, that Greenberg told Louis what to paint, though he probably had more influence over this lonely, gifted and insecure man than any American critic has had over any other artist. Nevertheless, Louis' instinct for light as the primal theme of painting...
...feeble grandfather through his final days. A saint? No, only a Danielle Steel heroine, traveling through life with a stiff moral code and a wardrobe of backless satin dresses. Throughout her 20th book, the author honors the great Late Show tradition: in Dodsworth (1936) Walter Huston sighed to Ruth Chatterton, "Did I remember to tell you today that I adore you?" In Casablanca (1942), as the Nazis marched on Paris, Bergman asked Bogart, "Was that cannon fire or is it my heart pounding?" Driscoll tells her lover, "It could never be as beautiful as this again. I want to remember...