I
wasn’t looking forward to Godwin’s books—not at all. Reading thick volumes by a
late eighteenth-century/early nineteenth-century philosopher—someone I’d never
really heard of until the advent of my Shelley mania—did not appeal to me. I
asked around. No one I knew had ever read anything by him. A few—liars?—professed
to have heard of him. Not helpful were Sunstein’s unappealing words. In her Mary Shelley,
his pale appeal approached translucence: Ordinary-looking
except for a bold forehead and intellectual expression, slow-moving, dressed
like a parson, Godwin was reserved, usually placid, even cold in manner, kept
his hands in his pockets or his arms folded. Gloomy words. And the two
illustrations of him that Sunstein provides are no encouragement, either. One
shows Godwin as a younger man, in right profile, looking dark and dour. Sharp
features, thinning hair. The other is a pencil sketch of him as an old man walking
on the streets of London. We see him from the left side, now a bit
portly, a bit bent, top hat, hands clasped behind his back. No smile. Looking
as if he’s wondering where he can find a tavern with a good Early Bird Special,
a place where he can narcotize the tapster with convoluted tales told in
endless sentences festooned with archaicism.
But
I knew I had no choice. I had to read
him. The man was the father of Mary Shelley—in a literary sense, the
grandfather of Victor Frankenstein. How could I write a biography of Godwin’s
daughter and neglect the career of her father?
I decided to start with a biography. So on 13 June 1997—Friday the Thirteenth, for Jason Voohrees’
sake!—I sat in Saywell’s, my favorite downtown coffee shop in Hudson, Ohio, and
opened Don Locke’s A Fantasy of Reason:
The Life & Thought of William Godwin (1980), a copy I’d acquired from a
used book dealer, who’d himself acquired it from the Altoona Area (Pennsylvania)
Public Library, where, if I can tell by its markings, it was checked out only once
(and renewed once) before being deaccessioned in 1984 (i.e., sent to an
orphanage, waiting for an adoptive parent—me!—to rescue it).[1] Locke’s first two sentences surprised
me: Hidden
away in some old library or bookshop you might one day come across the weighty
volumes of Political Justice, a work as obscure now as its author. Yet
there was a time when it was a popular sensation, a veritable prodigy of imagination
and intellect, and William Godwin the most famous, certainly the most
notorious, writer in the land.
Really? That colorless, unsmiling, portly guy? Popular? Notorious? Maybe this wouldn’t
be so bad … ?
It
took me about ten days to finish Locke’s 350-some pages, my reading slowed
somewhat because we were involved in the stressful process of selling our home
in Aurora, Ohio, where we’d lived since 1990. Our place there, one of the
oldest houses in town, was great and convenient—just about two blocks from
Harmon Middle School (where I taught) and only about eleven miles from Hiram
College (where Joyce was teaching), only one stoplight winking between our
house and Hiram. An added benefit: Our place was only a couple of miles from
the Alzheimer’s facility where resided Joyce’s mother, who was now gradually
and certainly and sadly forgetting everyone and everything she’d ever known. By
the end, she couldn’t remember how to swallow.[2]
But
in the spring of 1997, much had changed. Joyce’s mother had died on 5 February
1995, I had retired from Aurora in January 1997, and we had decided to return
to Hudson, where we’d lived from 1979–1990. We’d found another old house, this
one only a block from the business district, easy walking to most everything we
needed and liked. Still, it was a big move. And stress was the order of the
day.
But
in and among my packing and unpacking boxes and bitching about it—and dealing
with carpenters, electricians, plumbers—I managed to finish Locke’s
biography, and by the time I had done
so, I had a completely different view of Godwin. Here was no dull and dour,
black-and-white sourpuss but a vibrant intellectual, a popular philosopher and
novelist, an author of children’s books, a devoted husband and father and
friend. A man with some profound inconsistencies (even hypocrisies), some
stubborn pride, some intransigence. A man who rose far, fell farther. But a man
whose life excited me, whose writings, as I read through them—all of them—over the next couple of
years, would educate and animate me.
[2]
See Joyce’s wonderful book about her mother—In
a Tangled Wood: An Alzheimer’s Journey (SMU Press, 1996).
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