Keats and Chapman

Keats and Chapman once paid a visit to the Vale of Avoca, the idea being to have a good look at Moore’s tree. Keats brought along his valet, a somewhat gloomy character called Monk. Irish temperament, climate, scenery, and porter did not agree with Monk, whose idea of home and beauty was the East End of London and a glass of mild. He tried to persuade Keats to go home, but the poet had fastened on a local widow and was not to be thwarted by the fads of his servant. Soon it became evident that a breach between them was imminent. Things were brought to a head by a downpour which lasted for three days and nights. Monk tendered a savage resignation, and departed for Dublin in a sodden chaise. The incident annoyed Chapman.

‘I think you are well rid of that fellow,’ he said. ‘He was a sullen lout.’ Keats shook his head despondently.

‘The last rays of feeling and life must depart,’ he said sadly, ‘ere the bloom of that valet shall fade from my heart.’

Chapman coughed slightly.

THAT MAN KEATS

Once when Keats was rotting in Paris a kind old lady gave him a lump of veal and advised him to go home and cook and stuff it into himself. During a desperate attempt to grill it with a tongs over an open fire, the meat caught alight.

The poet is thought to have muttered something like ‘la Veal lumíere’ (under breath that hinted of bountifullest barleycorn). Chapman was out at the Folies.

KEATS AND ALL THAT

It is not generally known that…

O excuse me.

Keats and Chapman (in the old days) spent several months in the county Wicklow prospecting for ochre deposits. That was before the days of (your) modern devices for geological divination. With Keats and Chapman it was literally a case of smelling the stuff out. The pair of them sniffed their way into Glenmalure and out of it again, and then snuffled back to Woodenbridge. In a field of turnips near Avoca Keats suddenly got the pungent effluvium of a vast ochre mine and lay for hours face down in the muck delightedly permeating his nostrils with the perfume of hidden wealth. No less lucky was Chapman. He had nosed away in the direction of Newtonmountkennedy and came racing back shouting that he too had found a mine. He implored Keats to come and confirm his nasal diagnosis. Keats agreed. He accompanied Chapman to the site and lay down in the dirt to do his sniffing. Then he rose.

‘Great mines stink alike,’ he said.

People who come to see me with their problems often wonder at the queer name I have on my house-‘The Past’. Is it so queer after all? Is it not better than, say, ‘The Present’? ‘The Present’ seems to imply that the house is the gift of some friend rather than the result of my exertions as secretary of the Gaelic League, a post which I held at a time when the language was neither profitable nor popular, at a time when the sycophant and time-server dominated the counsels of the Irish nation, at a time when our land, broken and bleeding, yielded-nay,-proffered-the hand of friendship to her own exiled kith and kin resident in the distant continent of America, AT A TIME WHEN-

Excuse me.

But about this house of mine, I often hear people saying: ‘Ah, that poor man. Sure that poor man is living in “the Past”!’

And so I am. The poor law valuation is fifty quid.

The medical profession, remember, wasn’t always the highly organised racket that it is to-day. In your grandfather’s day practically anybody could take in hand (whatever that means) to be a physician or surgeon and embark on experiments which frequently involved terminating other people’s lives. Be that as it may, certain it is that Chapman in his day was as fine a surgeon as ever wore a hat. Chapman took in hand to be an ear nose and throat man and in many an obscure bedroom he performed prodigies which, if reported in the secular press, would have led to a question in the House. Keats, of course, always went along to pick up the odd guinea that was going for the anaesthetist. Chapman’s school-day lessons in carpentry often saved him from making foolish mistakes.

On one occasion the two savants were summoned to perform a delicate antrum operation. This involved opening up the nasal passages and doing a lot of work in behind the forehead. The deed was done and the two men departed, leaving behind a bleeding ghost suffering from what is nowadays called ‘postoperative debility’. But through some chance the patient lived through the night, and the following day seemed to have some slim chance of surviving. Weeks passed and there was no mention of his death in the papers. Months passed. Then Chapman got an unpleasant surprise. A letter from the patient containing several pages of abuse, obviously written with a hand that quivered with pain. It appeared that the patient after ‘recovering’ somewhat from the operation, developed a painful swelling at the top of his nose. This condition progressed from pain to agony and eventually the patient took to consuming drugs made by his brother, who was a blacksmith. These preparations apparently did more harm than good and the patient had now written to Chapman demanding that he should return and restore the patient’s health and retrieve the damage that had been done; otherwise that the brother would call to know the reason why.

‘I think I know what is wrong with this person,’ Chapman said. ‘I missed one of the needles I was using. Perhaps we had better go and see him.’ Keats nodded.

When they arrived the patient could barely speak, but he summoned his remaining strength to utter a terrible flood of bad language at the selfless men who had come a long journey to relieve pain. A glance by the practised eye of Chapman revealed that one of the tiny instruments had, indeed, been sewn up (inadvertently) in the wound, subsequently causing grandiose suppurations. Chapman got to work again, and soon retrieved his property. When the patient was re-sewn and given two grains, the blacksmith brother arrived and kindly offered to drive the two men home in his trap. The offer was gratefully accepted. At a particularly filthy part of the road, the blacksmith deliberately upset the trap, flinging all the occupants into a morass of muck. This, of course, by way of revenge, accidentally on purpose.

That evening Chapman wore an expression of sadness and depression. He neglected even to do his twenty lines of Homer, a nightly chore from which he had never shrunk in five years.

‘To think of the fuss that fellow made over a mere needle, to think of his ingratitude,’ he brooded. ‘Abusive letters, streams of foul language, and finally arranging to have us fired into a pond full of filth! And all for a tiny needle! Did you ever hear of such vindictiveness!’

‘He had it up his nose for you for a long time,’ Keats said.

A MEMOIR OF KEATS

Keats and Chapman once lived near a church. There was a heavy debt on it. The pastor made many attempts to clear the debt by promoting whist drives and raffles and the like, but was making little headway. He then heard of the popularity of these carnivals where you have swing-boats and roundabouts and fruit-machines and la-boule and shooting-galleries and every modern convenience. He thought to entertain the town with a week of this and hoped to make some money to reduce the debt. He hired one of these outfits but with his diminutive financial status he could only induce a very third-rate company to come. All their machinery was old and broken. On the opening day, as the steam-organ blared forth, the heavens opened and disgorged sheets of icy rain. The scene, with its drenched and tawdry trappings, assumed the gaiety of a morgue. Keats and Chapman waded from stall to stall, soaked and disconsolate. Chapman (unwisely, perhaps) asked the poet what he thought of the fiesta.

‘A féte worse than debt,’ Keats said.

Chapman collapsed into a trough of mud.

A GLIMPSE OF KEATS

Keats and Chapman were conversing one day on the street, and what they were conversing about I could not tell you. But anyway there passed a certain character who was renowned far and wide for his piety, and who was reputed to have already made his own coffin, erected it on trestles, and slept in it every night.

‘Did you see our friend?’ Keats asked.

‘Yes,’ said Chapman, wondering what was coming.

‘A terrible man for his bier,’ the poet said.

Keats once bought a small pub in London and one day he was visited by Dr Watson, confrére of the famous Baker Street sleuth. Watson came late in the evening accompanied by a friend and the pair of them took to hard drinking in the back snug. When closing time came, Keats shouted out the usual slogans of urgent valediction such as ‘Time now please!’, ‘Time gents!’, ‘The licence gents!’, ‘Fresh air now gents!’ and ‘Come on now all together!’ But Dr Watson and his friend took no notice. Eventually Keats put his head into the snug and roared ‘Come on now gents, have yez no Holmes to go to!’

The two topers then left in that lofty vehicle, high dudgeon.

Chapman had a small cousin whom he wished to put to a trade and he approached Keats for advice. The poet had an old relative who was a tailor and for a consideration this tailor agreed to accept the young man as an apprentice. For the first year however, he refused to let him do any cutting, insisting that he should first master the art of making garments up.

One day Chapman accidentally spilled some boiling porridge over his only suit, ruining it completely. The same evening he had an appointment with a wealthy widow and was at his wits’ end to know how he could get another suit in time. Keats suggested that the young apprentice should be called upon in the emergency. Chapman thought this a good idea and sent the apprentice an urgent message. Afterwards he had some misgivings as to the ability of a mere apprentice to produce a wearable suit in a few hours.

‘He’ll certainly want to spare no effort to have it finished by six o’ clock,’ he said gloomily.

‘He’ll have his work cut out,’ Keats said reassuringly.

Keats and Chapman once called to see a titled friend and after the host had hospitably produced a bottle of whiskey, the two visitors were called into consultation regarding the son of the house, who had been exhibiting a disquieting redness of face and boisterousness of manner at the age of twelve. The father was worried, suspecting some dread disease. The youngster was produced but the two visitors, glass in hand, declined to make any diagnosis. When leaving the big house, Chapman rubbed his hands briskly and remarked on the cold.

‘I think it must be freezing and I’m glad of that drink,’ he said. ‘By the way, did you think what I thought about that youngster?’

‘There’s a nip in the heir,’ Keats said.

Keats once tried to collar the Christmas card trade in pretty mottoes. He bought a quantity of small white boards and got to work burning philosophical quotations on them with a tiny poker. Festina Lente, Carpe Diem and Dum Spiro Spero, were produced in great numbers. Becoming more ambitious the poet showed Chapman a board bearing the words Proximus Ardet Ucalegon.

‘One does not like to be captious,’ Chapman said, ‘but I’m afraid there’s a word left out there.’

Keats looked at the board again.

‘You want Jam on it,’ he said.

While Keats and Chapman were at Heidelberg arranging for the purchase of cheap doctorates, the latter conceived a violent, wholly mysterious attachment for a practically supernumerary lecturer in Materia Med., by name Jakob Arnim-Woelkus, an incredible bore and a man wanting in the meanest of personal accomplishments. Chapman never wearied of this person’s company and in his absence, was for ever retailing the ‘pleasantries’ and sophisms of the deplorable bore. Keats, who could not bear this, kept out of his compatriot’s way as much as possible. Late in term, however, Keats, to heal the scars he had received in a duel, went walking into the mountains and persuaded Chapman to accompany him, fearing less the devil he knew than any foreigner. The two walked for hours, Keats gloomy, Chapman meditative. Not a word was exchanged until eventually they came to the brow of a hill whence a fine landscape was to be seen. Chapman, moved, spoke, student-wise, in dog Latin: Ah Keats! Hic utinam nunc sit Jacobus Arnim-Woelkus, doctor praeclaris-simus noster! Keats snarled, Odi, he roared, odi Prof. Arnim-Woelkus!

Keats had a nephew who evinced, even in early childhood, an unusual talent for manufacturing spurious coins. At the age of twelve he was already in the habit of making his own pocket money. His parents were poor and could not procure for him the tuition that would enable him to proceed from the science of penny-making to the more intricate and remunerative medium of work in silver. The boy’s attempts at making half-crowns were very poor indeed and on one occasion resulted in the father being presented with six months hard labour by a local magistrate. Keats, who was in reduced circumstances and could not offer any help himself, put the problem before Chapman, who was in tow with a wealthy widow. The widow was induced to give £100 to have the boy educated. Six months after the money had been given over and a tutor found, Keats and Chapman visited the boys home to see what progress was being made. They found the boy in his workshop engrossed in the production of a very colourable half-crown, working with meticulous industry on what was a very life-like representation of his late majesty, King Edward. To Keats, Chapman expressed satisfaction at the improvement in the boy’s skill.
‘I think he is making excellent progress,’ he said.
‘He is forging ahead,’ Keats said.

A MILLIONAIRE collector (whose name was ever associated with that old-time Irish swordsman of France, O’Shea d’Ar) once invited Chapman and Keats to dinner. The invitation came quite at the wrong time for Keats, who was crippled with stomach trouble. Chapman insisted, however, that the poet should come along and endeavour to disguise his malady, holding that millionaires were necessarily personable folk whose friendship could be very beautiful. Keats was too ill to oppose Chapman’s proposal and in due course found himself in a cab bound for the rich man’s bounteous apartments. On arrival Chapman covered up his friend’s incapacity by engaging the host in loud non-stop conversations and also managed to have Keats placed at an obscure corner of the table where little notice would be taken of him. Slumped in his chair, the unfortunate poet saw flunkeys deposit course after course of the richest fare before him but beyond raking his knife and fork through the food in desultory attempts to make a show of eating, he did not touch it. When the main course was served- a sight entirely disgusting to the eye of Keats- Chapman and the host were in the middle of a discussion on rare china. The host directed that a valuable vase on the mantelpiece should be passed round to the guests for inspection. Chapman gave a most enthusiastic dissertation on it, identifying it as a piece of the Ming dynasty. He then passed it to Keats, who was still slumped over his untouched platter of grub. The poet had not been following the conversation and apparently assumed that Chapman was trying to aid him in his extremity. He muttered something about the vase being ‘a godsend’ and after a moment handed it to the flunkey to be replaced on the mantelpiece. On the way home that evening Chapman violently reproached his friend for not making a fuss about the vase and pleasing the host.
‘I saw nothing very special about it,’ Keats said.
‘Good heavens man,’ Chapman expostulated, ‘it was a priceless Ming vase, worth thousands of pounds! Why didn’t you at least say nothing if you couldn’t say something suitable?’
‘I’m afraid I put my food in it,’ Keats said.