Books: Unbowed Head

WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY — Jerome Hamilton Buckley—Princeton University Press ($2.75).

The doctors of Edinburgh Royal Infirmary were having more than their share of trouble. Young Joseph Lister, disciple of France’s Louis Pasteur, was not only filling their ears with chatter about invisible somethings called “germs,” he was also filling their stately hospital with the horrid stench of carbolic acid—a so-called “antiseptic,” used hitherto for cleansing the Glasgow sewers.

In the fall of 1874, a young man named William Ernest Henley, son of a Gloucester bookseller, appeared before Lister and placed his life in the experimenter’s hands. At 25, Henley was dying of tuberculosis. The disease had settled in his lower legs, which were short and withered, although his torso and thighs were those of a giant. One foot had already been amputated; London surgeons wanted to amputate the other.

Never was a guinea pig more warmly welcomed. For 20 months young Henley lay on his back, while the daring Lister torturously scraped the infected foot bones with antisepticized instruments. To the general astonishment, gangrene failed to set in. When the scraping was successfully finished, the patient sat up and called for pencil and paper. Soon the editor of London’s Cornhill Magazine began publishing Henley’s In Hospital—a series of poems which concluded with the now-famed Invictus:

Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud; Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.

University of Wisconsin’s English Professor Jerome Hamilton Buckley, whose biography is the first contemporary study of the poet who became the most influential editor of his day, believes that Henley can best be understood through the psychological theories of the late Alfred (“Inferiority Complex”) Adler (TIME, Sept. 10). Years of suffering and physical inferiority, argues Author Buckley, aroused in Henley a fervent, bigoted passion for the vigorous, “masculine” things of life and art, and a corresponding contempt for all that was “effeminate” and decadent. The theme of Author Buckley’s study is the effect of this “activist” philosophy upon English literature in the last 20 years of the 19th Century.

The Pirate. When he was offered the editorship of London, a literary weekly, Henley burst into the inner circle of the intellectual world with a bull-like roar and the sound of breaking china. Bearded, massive, gaunt, propelling himself vigorously on heavy crutches like a “maimed Berserk,” Henley made a spectacular impression. Young Robert Louis Stevenson instantly selected him as model for the one-legged pirate Long John Silver in Treasure Island.

To the esthetic followers of “art for art’s sake,” Henley’s boisterous, often crude vitality seemed both stupid and frightening. Esthete Aubrey Beardsley was so terrified by his first glimpse of the “pirate” that he turned and ran for his life. Arch-esthete Oscar Wilde was made of sterner stuff. In a scathing review of Henley’s hospital poems (whose occasional beauties, said Oscar, were “very refreshing [bits] of affectation in a volume where there is so much that is natural”), he opened a running fight with Henley that lasted nearly 20 years. The fight ended indecisively in the ’90s when Henley knocked Wilde down with his crutch.

Henley fought with vigor from the editorial chairs of some half-dozen magazines, including the famed National Observer. He had three great enemies: 1) the new esthetic movement, 2) Socialism (which he termed “the Dominion of the Common Fool”) and 3) the powerful Victorian convention that all writing must be tailored to suit young ladies.

In a famed diatribe against Samuel Richardson’s much-revered classic, Pamela, Henley insisted that it was Britain’s mealy-mouthed writers, not her realists, who made “fornication [not] a detail (as it is in life)” but “the staple of the book.” Readers were not accustomed to such blunt talk in the ’80s, and under Henley’s editorship, one magazine after another lost the bulk of its subscribers.

The Heavy Pencil. But in this running rearguard action the editor gathered about him a corps of rising young writers, many of whom came to be known as “Henley’s Young Men.” Rudyard Kipling’s earliest, most virile poems, Barrack Room Ballads, were printed first by Henley—as were the stories of the Polish emigrant, Joseph Conrad, J. M. Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson, sections of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, the early lyrics of William Butler Yeats—and even the formal Henry James’s What Maisie Knew.

This galaxy of talent submitted meekly to Henley’s dictatorial editing. Editor Henley ruthlessly rewrote all his contributors—poets, essayists, novelists, the connoisseur of Continental cooking—leaving the well-known “trail of Henley” all over the magazine. “I was comforted,” said young Yeats, after Henley had laid a heavy pencil on his lyrics, “by my belief that [he] also rewrote Kipling.” It was “exceedingly characteristic” of Henley, said George Bernard Shaw, to be deeply puzzled by Shaw’s fury when a Shavian article in praise of Mozart was “edited” by Henley into a savage attack on Wagner.

Twice a week for many years, Henley and his Young Men met to drink and take on all comers. At these bull-sessions Henley, at the top of his immense voice, “reviewed the sorry state of art and society.” “To converse with him,” complained Wilde, “is a physical no less than an intellectual recreation.”

But at home, the terrible “Viking chief of letters” was completely dominated by his little daughter Margaret. “There was,” said J. M. Barrie, “an exuberance of vitality about her as if she lived too quickly in her gladness.” Barrie made Margaret the model for Wendy in Peter Pan—and had barely done so when she suddenly died, leaving her father half out of his mind with grief.

Henley’s retirement, which followed soon after his daughter’s death, scattered his cohort of young disciples to the four winds. Henley lived to complete, with his friend, John S. Farmer, a great seven-volume dictionary of English Slang and its Analogues. He also lived to drive in one of the new motorcars—a Mercedes “with the strength of seventy-five horses.” After the drive, in a final burst of “activism,” he sat down and wrote his vigorous Song of Speed, in which he hailed “the new scheme” of mechanized life as the new century’s retort to “the black, irresistible legions of Death.” A few days later the old man suffered a fatal injury when he stepped from a railway train that was moving at a faster mechanized speed than he realized.