What Are You Reading?: John Worthen

Leading on from our interview with Graham Henderson last week, we're continuing our 'What Are You Reading?' series with an interview with John Worthen - the author of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography (2019), which was one of the texts that Graham was reading!John Worthen taught at Downing College, Cambridge; University of Kent; and University College of Swansea before becoming Professor of D. H. Lawrence Studies at the University of Nottingham. He has written prolifically on Romantic and Modernist writers. Some of his monographs include The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons & the Wordsworths in 1802 (2001); D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (2005); Robert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician (2007); T. S. Eliot: A Short Biography (2009); An Introduction to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2013); William Wordsworth: A Critical Biography (2014); and, most recently, a fantastic (and highly recommended) seminal work entitled Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography (2019). This biography draws upon the many scholarly developments of recent years to build a compelling narrative on the life and death of this controversial and much loved writer and thinker.What new studies of literature are you engaged in right now?  Having finished the Shelley biography, I’m going sideways into reading in other fields and periods altogether and am also writing fiction rather more concentratedly.  My closest approach to the Romantics (and not very close) is in the sub-title of a new little novel about Frieda Lawrence, out shortly: ‘A Romance: with Words’ (the book is called Young Frieda).  But for fiction on the subject of Shelley and the romantics, no-one has ever done better, I think, than Judith Chernaik.  If you don’t know her novel Love’s Children, about the Shelley circle in 1817, get a copy at once.What’s the critical book that figured most significantly in your most recent monograph?As a biographer, I have an odd relationship with critical writing: mine is the avidity of the magpie, as I flit from book to book, and steal what I can.  Unlike the magpie, however, I do acknowledge what I find.  The critical books which helped me most were (in no special order) the two Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb books The Unfamiliar Shelley and The Neglected Shelley, various books by the late, deeply mourned Michael O’Neill, William Keach’s old but invaluable Shelley’s Style, Judith Chernaik’s even older The Lyrics of Shelley, and (oddly enough) Simon Haines’ The Divided Self. It’s that last book which will get me into most trouble; Haines’s book was widely dismissed as a deplorable piece of regressive spleen.  I find it one of the most original and thought provoking pieces of writing ever done on Shelley: it drives me wild, and I admire it deeply (what more can you hope for, from a critic?)What books are in your 'to read next' pile right now? I’m currently going into the seventeenth century, as I consider the life of the regicide Henry Marten: there’s a stack of history for me to read.  But there are also still, luckily, novels by the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald which I’ve not read: Innocence is one.  And – going back to my old interest in D. H. and Frieda Lawrence – there’s a massive book on the Swiss anarchist painter Ernst Frick waiting for me.  (Anyone able to name another Swiss anarchist painter?)What books are on your night table or desk?  John Berger is never far away: The White Bird sits beside me.  Robert Crawford’s biography Young Eliot is also there; he does properly (and brilliantly) what I mostly only guessed at in my own little Eliot biography, and I admire him greatly.  And who can ignore Julian Barnes (I quote from his Keeping an Eye Open in my Shelley biography)?Have there been any mainstream articles or publications on the Romantics you’d like to draw our attention to?  If there is anyone out there who has not yet looked into Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy’s 2016 Penguin edition of Shelley’s Selected Poems and Prose (it’s too easy to imagine ‘just another selection’), then I urge them to do so; it is the most comprehensive and best edited selection of Shelley’s work ever produced, and will intrigue even profound scholars.  And have you yet read Nora Crook’s ‘Shelley’s Jingling Food for Oblivion’, which appeared online in February 2019?  You must.Can you tell us about your recent biography of Shelley, and the process of writing it? What did you enjoy most?I can safely say that it was the hardest book I ever had to write and – oddly enough – probably the least satisfying to me.  Writing about Shelley is a dangerous occupation; he escaped from my grasp over and over again.  He was the most extraordinary person, thinker and writer, and you try and pin him down at your peril; he has always imagined more than you at first estimated, he has read a very great deal more than you have, and his language races ahead of your own, which feels a stunted growth in comparison.  He has a reason – sometimes an instinctive reason – for everything he does and writes.  That very late poem best entitled ‘Bright Wanderer’, for example, is a tour de force: Mary Shelley unwittingly drew attention to how strange it is when she omitted to transcribe or publish it, probably not only because it involved his feelings for Jane Williams, but because it is in the end so devastating about love, which Shelley compares to being speared like a fish while attracted to a bright light.  It’s an astonishing poem; I feel I have hardly begun to plumb its depths, in spite of devoting a chapter to it.That was an experience I had over and over again while writing.  One area of Shelley’s life where I may have found something new to say was on the subject of his earnings (almost non-existent) and his debts (massive: by 1822, in modern money, a million pounds or more): and what this meant for his relationship with England, and how he could never go back, for all his (admittedly contradictory) love for his country.  This is something scholars perhaps need to go into more deeply.The fact that the big book is out at last has, however, not stopped me thinking and writing about Shelley. I have another, tiny book coming out soon, called Shelley Drowns, which revisits Shelley’s last voyage, and contains an insight or two into the volatility of Prussic Acid.