Books: Odd Scrambling Fellow

THE SELECTED LETTERS OF WILLIAM COWPER (306 pp.)—Edited by Mark Van Doren—Farrar, Straus & Young ($3.50).

Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast, Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round, And while the bubbling and loud hissing urn Throws up a steamy column, and the cups That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each, So let us welcome peaceful evening in.

At William Cowper’s kindly beckoning, the readers of two centuries have lulled away many a peaceful evening—cheered, but never inebriated—at the mild brew of his poetry. Cowper (rhymes with hooper) is remembered fondly as a plump old country gentleman in a billowy cap; apt to giggle, but otherwise of a most pleasing conversation; delighted with his bed of pinks, devoted to his hares; the least pretentious and the most lovable of England’s 18th Century poets.

Unhappily, the cheery peace of this literary sampler is broken by a scarlet thread that runs wild through it all. William Cowper was a madman. He spent every moment of his last 25 years under the delusion that God hated him personally. Worse yet, Cowper’s God was irrevocably determined to betray him at every turn in this life, and to torture him eternally in the next. Under this ghastly sentence, Cowper wretchedly took up, as he said, “the arduous task of being merry by force.” He found temporary oblivion in lighthearted verse and in thousands of eloquent, cheerful letters to his friends.

Mark Van Doren’s excellent selection of Cowper’s letters, pieced out with biographical sections, tells the heartbreaking story of this gentle, tormented genius.

Apocalyptic Visions. William Cowper was only six when his mother, a descendant of the great John Donne, died of a fever. Timid little William never got over the shock of her death. Next year he took another severe shock when he was thrown to the young lions of an English boarding school. In sporting tradition, stronger boys mauled the weakling thoroughly, and with special zest because of an “intimate deformity” he is said to have had. William apparently made his “adjustment” by repressing his fear and shame and hatred. At any rate, when he was 21, and a law student in London, fear and shame and hatred came roaring up through his mind so powerfully and unexpectedly that they toppled his reason, and for several months he lived in a lunatic depression.

Eleven years later, in 1763, while preparing for civil service exams (and perhaps despairing over the end of his first and last romance), Cowper went out of his mind again. This time, convinced that God had damned him “below Judas,” he tried three times to kill himself. Two years later, with his obsession relieved but not gone, he banished himself for life to the country. For the next 35 years, at a succession of small houses in the country north of London, he lived in semi-seclusion, an “odd scrambling fellow” in a bright blue coat who pottered amiably about—now mending a bench, now gathering eggs in the hedge-bottoms, now scribbling at a taboret in the greenery.

“I must tell you a feat of my dog Beau,” he could write to a friend in the daytime hours—and then spin a pleasant story about how his dog had jumped into the river to bring him a water lily. The same night, he might be visited by one of his apocalyptic visions—mind-freezing apparitions that shrieked in his ears: “Actum est de te; perusti! [It is all over with thee; thou hast perished.]”

Deeps Unvisited. Sometimes the infinite prospect of God’s “desertion” was too much for even Cowper’s “passive valor.” “I now see a long winter before me,” he wrote bleakly in September 1783, “and am to get through it as I can. I know the ground before I tread upon it; it is hollow, it is agitated, it suffers shocks in every direction; it is like the soil of Calabria, all whirlpool and undulation; but I must reel through it—at least if I be not swallowed up by the way.”

In the winter of 1786-87, Cowper was utterly swallowed up by the way. After each attack he was left with less strength to support his despair. Yet somehow, in the decade 1780-90 Cowper managed to produce his finest poems (John Gilpin, The Task) and some of his most winsome letters. After 1790, however, the doomed man felt himself “plunged in deeps, unvisited, I am convinced, by any human soul but mine.”

From these deeps Cowper never rose again. A “secret negative” forbade him even to pray. He walked the cliff edges, hoping against hope that he would fall; but such easy exit was denied him. “Oh wretch!” he groaned, “to whom death and life are alike impossible!” In April of 1800 his sturdy physique mercifully collapsed at last, and the release of death came to William Cowper at 68.