Golden Codgers

 A great title, isn't it? Golden Codgers. It first caught my eye when Richard Ellmann's book of that name was published – 50 years ago now! – but I never got round to reading it. The title, however, lingered somewhere in my mind, along with the vague idea that I might read it some time – and now, after half a century, that time has come: browsing the other day in the excellent bookshop attached to the Samuel Johnson birthplace museum, I spotted Golden Codgers on a high shelf, and bought it there and then. 
  The title is from Yeats's 'News for the Delphic Oracle': 'There all the golden codgers lay,/There the silver dew,/And the great water sighed for love,/And the wind sighed too...' (from which lyrical opening, the poem works its way towards 'Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,/Belly, shoulder, bum/Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs/Copulate in the foam.') Yeats's golden codgers are Niamh and Oisin, Pythgoras and Plotinus; Ellmann's are various figures ranging in date from George Eliot to T.S., with Oscar Wilde a persistent presence, and Ruskin, Gide and Joyce also playing their part in a series of essays that Ellmann calls 'biographical speculations' (the kind of biography I like – I've never read Ellmann's doorstop biographies of Joyce and Wilde). In a beautifully written introductory essay, Ellmann explores the possibilities and limitations of literary biography, concluding that 'The controlled seething out of which great works come is not likely to yield all its secrets. Yet at moments, in glimpses, biographers seem to be close to it, and the effort to come close, to make out of apparently haphazard circumstances a plotted circle, to know another person who has lived as well as we know a character in fiction, and better than we know ourselves, is not frivolous. It may even be, for reader as for writer, an essential part of experience.' Well, that could certainly be said of Boswell's Johnson, I think, if not of many other biographies...
  So far, I have read only the first of Ellmann's 'speculations', and it is impressive: in 'Dorothea's Husbands', he considers the biographical question of who was the original of Casaubon in Middlemarch, while recognising the dangers inherent in reading over directly from any real-life personage into a fictional character. In the case of Casaubon, there are various plausible candidates from among Eliot's acquaintance, but most interestingly Ellmann quotes from a magazine interview with Eliot in which, when asked where she had found Casaubon, 'she pointed to her own heart'. 'She meant by it,' writes Ellmann, 'exactly what Flaubert had meant when he said, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." ... What must be sought is not a Casaubon, but casaubonism, and this George Eliot found, as Flaubert found le bovarysme, in herself. Casaubonism is the entombing of the senses in the mind's cellarage.' Ellmann also examines Eliot's marriage to the much younger  John Walter Cross, relating it to the inadequacy of Will Ladislaw, Dorothea's young second husband, as a character – 'a fantasy of middle age, indulged because innocuous ... his only imperfection being what is also his chief perfection – youth'.
  And now I am with Wilde and Ruskin at Oxford ('Overtures to Salome') and enjoying the ride. I'm glad that, 50 years on, I finally got round to Golden Codgers.