Freud′s Couch, Scott′s Buttocks, Brontė′s Grave (Culture Trails: Adventures in Travel) - Hardcover

Goldhill, Simon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226301311 ISBN 13: 9780226301310

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2011

Synopsis

The Victorian era was the high point of literary tourism. Writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Sir Walter Scott became celebrities, and readers trekked far and wide for a glimpse of the places where their heroes wrote and thought, walked and talked. Even Shakespeare was roped in, as Victorian entrepreneurs transformed quiet Stratford-upon-Avon into a combination shrine and tourist trap. Stratford continues to lure tourists today, as do many other sites of literary pilgrimage throughout Britain. And our modern age could have no better guide to such places than Simon Goldhill. In "Freud's Couch, Scott's Buttocks, Bronte's Grave", Goldhill makes a pilgrimage to Sir Walter Scott's baronial mansion, Wordsworth's cottage in the Lake District, the Bronte parsonage, Shakespeare's birthplace, and Freud's office in Hampstead. Traveling, as much as possible, by methods available to Victorians - and gamely negotiating distractions ranging from broken bicycles to a flock of giggling Japanese schoolgirls - he tries to discern what our forebears were looking for at these sites, as well as what they have to say to the modern mind. What does it matter that Emily Bronte's hidden passions burned in this specific room? What does it mean that Scott self-consciously built an extravagant castle suitable for Ivanhoe - and star-struck tourists visited it while he was still living there? Or that Freud's meticulous recreation of his Vienna office is now a meticulously preserved museum of itself? Or that Shakespeare's birthplace features student actors declaiming snippets of his plays...in the garden of a house where he almost certainly never wrote a single line? Goldhill brings to these inquiries his trademark wry humor and a lifetime's engagement with literature. The result is a travel book like no other, a reminder that even today, the writing life still has the power to inspire.

About this title

About the Author

Simon Goldhill is professor of Greek literature and culture and fellow and director of studies in classics at King's College, Cambridge, as well as director of the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group. He is the author of Love, Sex, & Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

FREUD'S COUCH SCOTT'S BUTTOCKS BRONTĖ'S GRAVE

By Simon Goldhill

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2011 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-30131-0

Contents

Acknowledgments..........................................vii1 THE GOLDEN TICKET......................................12 LION HUNTING IN SCOTLAND...............................173 PANTING UP THE ENDLESS ALP OF LIFE.....................374 SEETHING IN YORKSHIRE..................................615 OH FOR A MUSE OF FIRE!.................................836 FREUD, ACTUALLY........................................103How to Get There.........................................123Photo Credits............................................131Further Reading..........................................127

Chapter One

THE GOLDEN TICKET

I HAVE NEVER STOPPED being slightly anxious about the premise of this book. "Make a pilgrimage," proposed my editor over a grilled tuna salad. "Go anywhere and write about it." It sounds at first like a golden ticket. A set of destinations rose like a sunrise in my mind. The romance of the dusty open road, or at very least a Kerouac fantasy, is part of the adolescent mind of everyone of my generation. The mysterious traveler who blows into town, the life-changing encounter with a stranger, never forgotten, never recovered, the slow climb that reveals the breathtaking view—we all share these cultural myths, as we trudge to work or sit halfheartedly at the desk.

The trouble is that any really serious pilgrim travels alone. You are meant to make a journey where the very traveling leads you to explore yourself, your relation to God, or your life or your past. The endpoint is somehow only a small part of the process of inward transformation. This sort of pilgrimage started with the early Christians. A woman called Egeria left France and went to the Holy Land in the fourth century. It is boggling to imagine how hard it must have been, even with the securities of the Roman Empire and its straight roads and military checkpoints, for a woman to travel alone, as a Christian when Christianity was still a precarious institution, across such a distance and in such conditions. But not only did she make it there and back, she also wrote an account for her fellow sisters of the Church, telling of her tearful, overwhelmed response to the sites of the Passion, and of the services and worship she saw. It is one of the very first bits of prose we have written by a woman, and it now survives just in fragments, a tattered glimpse of her journey across deserts and darkness toward her enlightenment. I have a soft spot too for Prudentius, the fourth-century Christian Latin poet from Spain, who describes stopping in a church on his solitary trip to Rome, where he lay on the ground in front of the picture of a saint, weeping and wailing all afternoon at the image of martyrdom. That's how pilgrims do it—on bloodied knees, crawling toward an epiphany of self-awareness.

But I don't like being on my own. Although I am an academic who loves to spend all day in the library, and I get very jumpy if I don't get those long reading hours, nonetheless I don't like to eat alone, drink alone, sleep alone, walk alone, or even be silent for long. (I am not necessarily the person you want to sit next to in the library.) But if you go on a pilgrimage with a bunch of mates, I thought to myself, it is bound to turn into a comedy. You end up with Three Men in a Boat (and Montmorency the dog). Or Chaucer's pilgrims—a bawdy, sexy, drunken crew who started from a pub for a good time out together, telling stories all the way. Even Robert Louis Stevenson, an intense and self-absorbed young man, found that his journey of self-discovery veered into comedy the moment he decided to travel with a donkey (called Modestine, and the real star of his Travels with a Donkey). When you are no longer alone, instead of the Kerouac moment on the open road, it's Cliff Richard singing, "We're all going on a summer holiday," or Little Miss Sunshine. I had no desire to go there. Travel with a group might just be able to escape comedy, I supposed, but only at the expense of something worse: I knew the shuffling lines at Lourdes, the coach parties in Jerusalem, intently following the upheld umbrella toward the photo op of spirituality. I had no desire to go there either.

My first attempt to find some middle ground between lonely, despairing self-analysis and group pranks involved me sidling up to my wife, the lawyer. She is used to cutting through the desperate prose of her opponent's hopeful arguments. "You want me to be the straight woman to your pilgrim wit," she sniffed. "Or you want me to be the dumb American, while you expound on the history of places older than my country. Unattractive invitation. I'm not taking time off work for that." (Lawyers do not think of time like you or I do. There is no place for pleasure, let alone a journey of self-discovery. Time is divided simply into billable hours and nonbillable hours.) As I further reflected—aloud, stupidly enough—that a pilgrimage with one's wife would mean a journey of discovery into the complexities of marriage, a portrait of one's soul mate, so the prospect of a road trip for two—It Happened One Night? Thelma and Louise?—receded further and further. So I decided that what I needed to do was to make up a party of four Jews. To be four Jews on a train would have the structure of a joke—that would deal with the comedy—but you could guarantee that one of us at least would always be depressed and overintellectualize the occasion.

While I was ruminating on how a one might organize a modern, gregarious, uncomic pilgrimage, I was also struggling with the more pressing concern of where I wanted this pilgrimage to go. Each of my friends had a view, and expressed it firmly with growing excitement, as their imagination toyed with the golden ticket. I had quickly ruled out the natural world: Ayers Rock may be reached by a dusty road, but I couldn't see any mileage in a trip to such a hokey site of spiritual transformation. I had already written two books about Jerusalem, and the trip to get there is nothing, these days, in comparison to the difficulty of living there (unless you come from the occupied territories, and that would be a different project altogether, especially for four Jews). I could contemplate visiting the Ganges or Mount Fuji or any one of a host of pilgrimage sites my friends came up with, but the trip would be marred for me by the relentlessly touristy nature of such a project—I could only ever experience it as a rank outsider, baffled by the holiness of cows or nodding politely at awe before cherry blossoms. I was afraid that all I could do would be to smile at my own inability to escape from the stereotypes I already had—or end up like a Westerner in a sari, sadly mimicking a longed-for mystique. I wanted a trip that wouldn't leave me gaping or aping.

My editor came to my rescue. "Do something Victorian," she said. I had been nattering right through the tuna salad about the thrill of my new project on nineteenth-century ideas of the past, and my research group in Cambridge, and how great it was to be paid to read Victorian novels. Her insight was brilliant. Pilgrimage was all over the place in Victorian Britain, but not in the way we might immediately expect. The notion of a Victorian pilgrimage set me whirring with excited ideas and plans. The disappointment on the faces of my friends—no islands off the coast of Morocco? no elephants?—made me realize that I needed first to explain how pilgrimage became a Victorian fad, and why this pilgrimage would lead us into some amazing territory.

Let me start with some very general background, and, with pilgrimage, we are bound to start with religion. The nineteenth century experienced the fiercest arguments and conflicts over religion since the Reformation. Bred as we are to Masterpiece Theatre or BBC costume dramas, which always seem to find serious religion embarrassing or perturbing, this part of nineteenth-century culture has been rather swept under the carpet these days. But Britain, for most of the century at least, was staunchly Protestant, and the connection of church and state helped make the church an absolutely integral part of the social and intellectual life of the country, as well as providing its religious framework. Until decades into the century, only professed Anglicans could enter university or Parliament, and the battle to allow others—Nonconformists, Catholics, Jews—into these institutions of power was a nasty and protracted one (admitting women took even longer, mind you). The vicar and parson were central to the social and educational life of most communities. But at the same time, Nonconformists vied with evangelicals and atheists as the extremes against which the broad church struggled to define itself. Faith was a battleground. Students argued fiercely about religion; there were anti-Catholic riots; books were burned. The newspapers fizzed with accusations and counteraccusations about the Oxford Movement, the claims of science, the discoveries of biblical archaeology.... Religion mattered in a way most of modern Britain has quite forgotten—though there are many places in the world that do still understand such a passionate engagement. Particularly in the middle of the nineteenth century, it really was important to be earnest about religion: it was a sign of who you were and who you wanted to be. It is easy to forget that the rational, scientific, modern novelist George Eliot was a renegade evangelical Christian, who lost her piety and her reputation, in search of her new self.

In the mind of the common-or-garden Anglican, pilgrimage in the sense that Egeria or Prudentius understood it was dangerously connected to the Catholic Church. It was the sort of thing people on the Continent did. It was associated with priests leading processions, with ritual, and, above all, with relics. Protestants dismissed relics as a besotting sin of Catholic error. Protestant truth rejected kissing old bones and didn't believe in miracles effected by touching a dead human's remains. It seemed superstitious at best, and at worst positively perverted. With the invention of the steamship and the opening of the borders of the Ottoman Empire, more and more British and American travelers visited Jerusalem. Each trip inevitably took on the aspect of a pilgrimage, but almost every Protestant was shocked not just by the small size, dirt, and, well, foreignness of the squalid Ottoman backwater, but also by the forms of worship they saw in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. "Fetish adoration," "the worship of wood and stone," were typical accusations. One phrase was especially insulting and it was repeated and challenged, again and again. It was coined by the celebrated American archaeologist Edward Robinson, one of the pioneers of exploring the Holy Land. "Credulous superstition and pious fraud," he commented on the scene of emotional pilgrims at the site of the Crucifixion, and the words "pious fraud," with their implication of hypocrisy or deception, summed up Protestant distaste for pilgrimage when it involved the full gamut of Catholic worship.

So proper Englishmen did not go on pilgrimages, if it meant struggling toward Santiago de Compostela to kneel before the bones of Saint James. They might take their guidebook and go with Thomas Cook to observe the rituals, then write home about the exoticism and distastefulness of what they had seen. But stones and bones were not meant to be kissed. The nineteenth century is the great era for travel books, for adventure stories, for exploration, for patrolling the empire's boundaries, but especially in comparison with the medieval period, with which so much Victorian art, history writing, and literature was fascinated, pilgrimage had the air of joining a nasty cult. Even in England itself, where there had been a popular tradition of pilgrimage—Walsingham, Becket's tomb at Canterbury, Lindisfarne—when Victorian gentlemen and ladies visited churches, it was more likely to be to explore the architecture with art-historical eyes, their spiritual guide, the art critic Ruskin.

Yet pilgrimage remained a powerful lure for the English and American Protestants, in a displaced way, as it were. Thomas Carlyle was perhaps the most charismatic of Victorian sages—the grumpy and fierce intellectual was one of the most widely read and widely influential figures of the period—and he captures the drive behind this nineteenth-century pilgrim experience well when he writes, "Literature is but a branch of Religion, and always participates in its character: however, in our time, it is the only branch that still shows any greenness; and, as some think, must one day become the main stem." For Carlyle, literature these days—"in our time," as the Victorians, ever aware of themselves as living in a new age of progress, kept repeating—is starting to become a sort of religion. Cardinal Newman—now a full-blown saint—whose conversion to Catholicism was so shocking for midcentury society, typically wanted to narrow the force of literature to religious poetry: "The taste for poetry of a religious kind has in modern times in a certain sense taken the place of the deep contemplative spirit of the early Church.... Poetry ... is our mysticism."

John Keble, the austere theologian who gave his name to the ugliest college in Oxford, wrote one of the most successful books of poetry, religious or otherwise, in the nineteenth century. The Christian Year sold a quarter of a million copies, though it is scarcely read even by scholars these days. It offers a spiritually uplifting and, to modern tastes like mine, a dull and squirmingly pious poem for every significant festive day of the year. Keble saw poetry as a sort of balm, a miracle cure for humans: the "glorious art of poetry is a kind of medicine divinely bestowed upon man," bringing "healing relief to secret mental emotion." No need, then, when in anxiety or pain, to collapse before the shrine of a saint: read a poem in the garden or by the fire. Poetry was experienced as a religion. Here's how a novelist in the 1880s captures the feeling: "Wordsworth unconsciously did for me what every religious reformer had done,—he recreated my Supreme Divinity, substituting a new and living spirit for the old deity, once alive but gradually hardened into an idol." Literature was not just medicine for the sick soul, it was inspirational, transformative, a journey of self-discovery.

This changing status of literature was made possible by technological advances in publishing and transport. Thanks to cheap paper, printing machines, the postal system, and the railway network, inexpensive copies of novels, tracts, and poems, along with newspapers, journals, and reviews, circulated swiftly across Europe and America. A whole new reading public had emerged—public education had also expanded considerably (if slowly and contentiously)—and there were fortunes to be made by publishers and writers. Where very successful books in the eighteenth century had circulated in thousands, in the nineteenth century hundreds of thousands of copies of hot, new novels flooded the market and were eagerly devoured. One consequence of this media revolution is that writers became superstars. Novelists such as Dickens or Thackeray, poets such as Tennyson, historians such as Macaulay or George Grote, essayists like Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, or Ralph Waldo Emerson, were lionized in London and New York, made tours in England and America, where thousands bought tickets to hear them lecture, and, perhaps most importantly, became figures of the imagination. To be a writer became a career choice, tinged with Romantic ideals; the image of the lady novelist, for example, or the man of letters, became the subject of hopeful aspiration, parodic jokes, and cultural prestige. As literature became religion, the writer became the sage, the prophet, the inspirational preacher and leader—the guide to one's internal life.

It is not by chance, then, that in the nineteenth century we find a new phenomenon: the tour to visit writers' houses. The birthplace, the grave, the house where the writer lived, or even where the writer was now living—all, for the first time, became sites of pilgrimage. The journey was treated like a visit to a saint's shrine. So a young man, living "'mid the din of towns and cities," in the grime and noise of the industrialized urban sprawl, might carefully plan his train trip to the north to visit Wordsworth's cottage. He would walk up from the station, noting the places and country sights memorialized by the poetry he knew and loved, and pause by the gate of the home of the master. If he was lucky, the elderly Wordsworth might give him a tour— Wordsworth did this a great deal, and had a good script. If he were too shy or polite to enter, or if Wordsworth was not there, he might pluck a leaf from the garden and jealously keep it to be pressed, and contemplated, when back again at home, in the "lonely rooms" of the town, a relic of his restorative journey back to nature, in search of the poet of nature. (I should probably say that this rather sappy composite picture is based on a set of Victorian letters about precisely such a trip and its preserved leaf. But it wasn't just sad young men—Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot too both asked for petals from the poet's garden.) To visit the writer's house was to be touched by the writer's charisma, an experience to be treasured.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from FREUD'S COUCH SCOTT'S BUTTOCKS BRONTĖ'S GRAVEby Simon Goldhill Copyright © 2011 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226301311
• ISBN 13: 9780226301310
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 160