Reading the newspaper during the 2007 primaries, I came across a caricature of then-candidate Hillary Clinton that captured the humor and bite that I enjoy in 17thcentury English satire. In the drawing, Clinton is depicted as a weathervane, like the rooster on top of an old red barn or a New England church. The picture provides an ironic take on the campaign message she utters into the air: “Elect me, and I’ll take the country in a new direction.” We’re invited to respond: Where exactly might that be? Who says you’ll stay pointing in that direction?
The caricature raises important questions about the identities of public figures. To believe a campaign promise requires assuming that the candidate will remain the same person in the future as she is at present. But do we have enough information to make that assumption? How do we know that the one who promises isn’t just saying what people want to hear, presenting an empty image calculated to obtain votes?
It’s easy to lampoon politicians, but perhaps their efforts to manage an image are not so different from the more mundane experience of living in a diverse, polarized society, where the attempt to maintain a stable identity can feel less like the expression of a fixed position than the difficult, creative work of staying engaged in an evolving dialogue. Think of the tightrope walker bending this way and that, shifting his weight to keep his balance. We act and react, intending outcomes and adapting to circumstances. In the process, we become aware of ourselves in ways that may not square with the inferences that others have drawn based on our prior actions.
This more charitable approach to the record of one’s life distinguishes Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon , a biography of the 17thcentury poet by Nigel Smith. Smith, a professor of English at Princeton University, renders a complex, secretive Marvell (162178), whose discomfort for public life existed in tension with his abilities as secretary, poet, and Member of Parliament for the town of Hull. The biography draws on a new generation of literary and historical scholarship, building on the recent Yale edition of Marvell’s prose works and the critical edition of Marvell’s poems that Smith himself published in 2003.
The achievement of The Chameleon is won almost by default, since biographies of the poet are few in number and typically limited in scope. What stands out in this work of history, though, is the nuanced reading of Marvell’s poems. Take, for example, the account of Marvell’s departure to Europe in 1642, during the Civil War years. At each stage of the trip, we learn about the Continental traditions Marvell encountered and the way he incorporated them into his early, unpublished poems. Smith provides insight into the poet’s growth and the literary techniques that would stay with him throughout his career. A later chapter delivers a fascinating account of the verse satire “Last Instructions to a Painter” (1667), where we learn how Marvell used his inside political knowledge as a Member of Parliament to expose corruption during the Second AngloDutch War. In this way, The Chameleon invites a general reader to enjoy wellwrought poems too often overlooked for their lack of dazzling image or metaphysical conceit.
The events and players that help make sense of Marvell’s literary output can be difficult to keep straight. We must learn about the “Rump” Parliament, Acts of Uniformity, and the distinctions separating the Presbyterian from the Fifth Monarchist. At times, readers will find the biography slow going, especially in the coverage of Parliamentary matters during the 1660s. Moreover, neither the wealth of detail nor the contextual reading of individual poems manages to pin Marvell down. But that is the point. Smith asks us to take another look, for example, at such standards as the seduction poem “To His Coy Mistress” and the retirement poem “The Garden.” If we thought those poems granted intimate access to the poet, The Chameleon makes him elusive in new and interesting ways. The lyrics retract as much as they offer, as if, to cite “The Garden,” “annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade.”
What Marvell actually believed and when he believed it are longstanding questions. Political and religious positions are thorny in this period, and the poet was able to move in diverse circles while controlling, for the most part, his short temper. Marvell could elegize a staunch royalist, then turn and write an elegy for the enemy of the royalists, Oliver Cromwell. Clearly, he was pragmatic and stoically reserved. It is even possible that he served as a double agent during the years of the Protectorate. Smith finds it relevant, however, that Marvell’s clergyman father kept subversive theological texts and that the young poet was suspected of becoming a Catholic while at Cambridge University. In light of his later efforts to increase religious toleration, these details suggest Marvell’s capacity for imaginative sympathy, a capacity which Smith identifies as presaging the rational religion of Deism. Although this last point deserves more scrutiny, readers will agree that Marvell’s “ability to see himself in others and them in him is startling.”
The through-line connecting Marvell’s lyrics, odes, elegies, and verse satires with his prose works and political activity owes to this sympathetic mirroring. Smith notes that reflective surfaces feature in several poems. In “An Elegy Upon the Death of My Lord Francis Villiers” (1648), Marvell describes his aristocrat friend’s preference for heroic action over matters of beauty: “Lovely and admirable as he was, / Yet was his sword or armour all his glass.” In the Cromwell elegy, Providence takes on the properties of a mirror, as “the Glass where all appears.” Traditionally, the mirror is also associated with the literary mode of satire. The satirist exposes abuses, it is often claimed, by holding up a mirror to society. Such a conception certainly fits Marvell’s ability to target corruption and bigotry, as in his celebrated attack on religious persecution in the prose satire The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672-73).
Smith also points to Marvell’s use of the mirror as a conceptual metaphor. In “The Loyal Scot” (1667-73), the title character’s Scottish and English identities, though divisive, are shown to reflect each other. If Marvell’s ego is strangely absent from his poems, identity here takes the form of “a split self where two versions are always in a relationship of mutual reflexivity.” It is energizing to frame the verse in terms that make Marvell relevant for subsequent literature. “The Loyal Scot” anticipates the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707 and the growing complexity of national identity. In a similar way, The Rehearsal Transpros’d looks ahead to the cutting irony of Swift and the Enlightenment attack on state religion.
The “chameleon” is one of several labels used to raise suspicions about unstable identities in early modern political culture. (“But yours is much of the cameleon hue / To change the dye with every different view,” as John Dryden puts it in The Hind and the Panther.) Others include the turncoat, the “ambodexter,” the weathervane, and—my favorite—the wherryman, who rows one way while looking another. With its choice of subtitle, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon gestures to the emergence of openness and transparency as norms of public life. However, this Marvell is lauded for subverting such expectations. In the irony that emerges, the methods of poetry provide the foundation for the political battle waged by Marvell in support of toleration for Nonconformists. The poems do not espouse a platform or particular viewpoint. Rather, the engagement with poetry leads Marvell to develop a more humane, sympathetic political vision.
Readers will judge whether Smith does enough to distance the chameleon from its negative connotations. For my part, it is refreshing to find the distinction between poets and politicians blurred in this insightful, provocative way.
Jeffrey Galbraith is assistant professor of English at Wheaton College.
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