I was gazing over
the last few decades’ self-help books and romances on the bookshelves of a
nearby Salvation Army store when my eye was caught by the familiar form of a
faded early Everyman’s library volume with handsome ornamentation on the spine,
reminiscent of William Morris design. It
dated from 1906, the year that J. M. Dent launched this admirable series of classics
costing only a shilling. The title -- The
Romany Rye -- was unknown to me and its meaning obscure, though the
author’s name George Borrow seemed like one I had heard before. His own story turned out to be at least as
compelling as the narratives he put to
paper.
George Borrow’s
name has fallen into obscurity, yet during the Victorian Age he was a literary
man of consequence. His The Bible in
Spain, recounting his activities distributing Protestant scriptures in
Spain and including descriptions of the country in general as well as details
about the Romani population [1], was a minor best-seller, going through six
printings in a year. He went on to write
two novels which, while they were less popular than his book on Spain, were
highly regarded for decades, entering the canon briefly before sinking into
neglect. His book Wild Wales contains
much lore and careful (if Romantic) nature description, though Borrow
repeatedly manages to maneuver the rhetorical spotlight onto himself. He translated a sufficient quantity to fill
sixteen volumes, including significant work from an astonishing range of
languages, though much was unpublished in his lifetime. He made so bold as to produce English
versions of works in Danish, German, Old Norse, Russian, and Turkish, and a
variety of other tongues, as well as translating the Bible into Manchu and a
Gypsy dialect. One book that did see
print has the remarkable title Targum Or Metrical Translations from Thirty
Languages (1835). Meanwhile he also
found leisure to research and publish six volumes of Celebrated Trials and
Remarkable Cases of Criminal Jurisprudence from the Earliest Records to the
year 1825.
He produced this
remarkable literary output, in part the work of a non-university man seeking to
support himself with his pen, at the same time as he devoted considerable enthusiasm
to the cause of Protestant Christianity.
He acquired half his languages to
assist in proselytizing and pursued converts in such unlikely places as
Catholic Spain and Orthodox Russia. His
virulent anti-Catholic prejudices are evident in much of his work (as is his
English patriotism), and his uncompromising evangelism led twice to his
imprisonment.
Around the time of
my copy’s publication, H. W. Boynton in The Atlantic called Borrow “a
writer of unique genius,” adding that “that genius found, of course, its best
expression in Lavengro and its sequel.”
To Boynton not only is “the charm of his mere style” “irresistible,” in
addition “the peculiarity of the subject-matter” “will keep Borrow’s writings
alive.” He felt confident that “whatsoever
books of the Victorian epoch are smothered and lost beneath the
ever-accumulating mass of English literature, Borrow’s writings will be
remembered.” [2] In an introductory note
that prefaced the 1893 edition of Lavengro,
Theodore Watts ventures to say that “there are passages in “Lavengro” which are
unsurpassed in the prose literature of England—unsurpassed, I mean, for mere
perfection of style—for blending of strength and graphic power with limpidity
and music of flow.” He goes on to describe Borrow as “splendid,” “brilliant,” “classic,”
and a “genius,” adding that “all competent critics” allowed Lavengro and
The Romany Rye “to be among the most delightful books in the language.” A
few years later Edward Thomas said, begging the question: “We to-day have many
temptations to over praise him, because he is a Great Man.” [3] And the Brittanica’s article yet today
declares him “one of the most imaginative prose writers of the 19th century.”
Though the only
clues to ambivalence in Boynton’s praise are his use of the words “unique” and “peculiar,”
the authors of many of the standard literary histories were more
straightforward in qualifying Borrow’s place in Parnassus. They are likely to use terms like “idiosyncratic”
or, in a slightly more circumspect, phrasing: “No figure is more original than
that of Borrow.” Some prefer to provide an explicitly balanced
judgement: “There are dull stagnant
places in his books, and there are passages aflame with genius.” Another notes
circumspectly that “more than one of the publications of George Borrow are
still held in honour by critics of eminence” due to their containing “enough of
the genuine spice of free genius to overpower our sense of their eccentricity
and offences against good taste.” [4]
By 1912 opinion
had shifted sufficiently that his first biographer speaks of him as passé. “It was Borrow’s fate, a tragic fate for a
man so proud, to outlive the period of his fame. Not only were his books forgotten, but the
world anticipated his death by some seven or eight years.” [5] A review of another survey of the author in
1929 flatly calls him “one of the most pathetic failures” in letters whose
writing “leaves much to be desired.” [6]
From the start
critics had puzzled over the genre of The Romany Rye. They accurately noted its picaresque
character, but devoted considerable discussion to the question of whether it
and its predecessor Lavengro should be considered fiction or
memoir. Very little of either book,
though, is devoted to the primary line of narration. In The Romany Rye the love interest
with Isopel is so discreet as to be almost vanishing, and she does indeed
disappear early, only to bob up again at second-hand much later. The reader’s interest is to be held by the
story of the narrator’s acquisition and sale of a horse. The animal is more or less forced upon the
hero, for reasons that remain obscure, and the sale, though occurring in the
midst of a variety of tensions, takes place without incident. In the very last line, in a wholly unexpected
turn, the narrator contemplates traveling to India, scattering the wispy
fragments of a plot.
The Romany Rye
clearly lacks the formal unity of a conventional novel. The book does not fit the genre of
autobiography as it provides no coherent pattern of a particular life. Neither is it a proper travel book as the
descriptions both of the Romani camp and of the countryside are for the most
part vague or conventional or both. At
heart The Romany Rye resembles most those collections of odd stories
midway between folk-tale and modern short fiction, the kind of tales in Canterbury
Tales, the Decameron, Painter's Palace of Pleasure, or the Thousand
and One Nights that replicated for a more literate age the archaic
story-teller around a fire. One speaker
succeeds another, the Old Man, the Hungarian, the Postilion, the Jockey, and
Murtagh all tell stories, and the sum of these together constitutes a
significant portion of the book.
These inserted
narratives have a miscellaneous character.
The tale of the old man robbed of his ass in Chapter XXI resembles a folk-tale with its
retributive justice and the concluding idyll of rural simplicity as the old man
cultivates his garden to the humming of his bees. The man in Chapters XXXII to XXXIV who
becomes an aficionado of “crockery literature” is pure quaint picturesqueness
as is the jockey’s knowledge of “coin sharping,” Hopping Ned and Biting
Giles. Borrow does not mind retooling
old stories like the history of Hunyadi (Ch. XXXIX) and of Finn-ma-Coul (Ch.
XLIV). Yet these little divertimentos
add up to very little.
Apart from
included narratives, other sections are similarly irrelevant to any central
plotline. The Man in Black, whose
discourse covers three chapters (II-IV) is a straw man for Borrow’s
narrow-minded anti-Catholic prejudice.
Just when one might think Borrow might better be establishing the
verisimilitude of his story, he features a caricature who talks as the most
cynical priest has never done. Other
chapters are related in the voice of Ursula, the landlord, and the ostler, leaving
very little spacet for the narrator’s own affairs. It is as if the “novel” is composed in large
part of filler material.
For today’s reader
the book remains a curiosity. If the
style has little charm and the structure is almost arbitrary (it has been
called “formless” [7]), the one-time popularity of The Romany Rye might
be explained by its providing access to an exotic culture of which few Britons
had experience as intimate at Borrow’s.
Yet, in spite of his adoption of the Romani, living and working
side-by-side with them and learning their language, exceedingly little
information about them finds a place in his book. Apart from the use of some Romani words which
provides a patina of authenticity and references to “dukkerin”
(fortune-telling) and theft, he tells his readers virtually nothing about their
beliefs and practices. Significantly, the
titles of both his novels , though couched, he tells his readers, in Romani
dialect, refer to Borrow himself: Lavengro meaning “wordmaster” and The
Romany Rye meaning the “Gypsy Gentleman.”
What appeals to Borrow’s readers is not the Romani vision of the world,
which would require a fuller picture, but rather his own. Bourgeois homebodies are engaged by the
sensibility of this man who has chosen to live among the outcast, and this is
perhaps the key to his charm.
The same critic
who found Borrow’s work to lack structure also noted that he is “unique in
English literature for the sense they convey of intimate contact with
adventurous, lawless life.” [8] The
vagueness of the last three works is significant. The reader is entertained not by becoming
acquainted with Romani life in particular, but rather by imaginative intimacy
with the “adventurous, lawless life” of a white Englishman. While The Romany Rye certainly looks
back toward picaresque novels, which regularly featured footloose heroes, it
looks also forward to the twentieth century vagabond road books that hover
between memoir and novel: London’s The Road, Orwell’s Road to Wigan
Pier, and Kerouac’s On the Road.
Though at first glance the concluding resolution to go to India seems to
come out of the blue, it is the clearest sign for a Westerner of daring
adventure as much in Borrow’s time it seems as in the nineteen-sixties.
Borrow might be
considered a late Romantic gasp, a last Byronic hero, doing what his readers
would not dare to do but about which they relish reading. His
exoticism and counter-cultural enthusiasm rise directly from Romantic
models. He has the assertive ego of the
nonconformist, the bluster of a mountebank, the theatrics of a man who likes
the spotlight. Childe Harold enjoyed a
considerable audience, but he seemed to be putting up the highest existential
stakes as his creator did in Greece. In
comparison with the profundity of Byronic alienation and anxiety, though,
Borrow seems a mere entertainer, though with a similar self-absorption. The Romany Rye wanders about, free of real
risk or drama. Arthur Compton-Rickett
noted in 1912 that his persona regularly betrayed “a curious selfishness.” His characters seem to “exist chiefly for his
own curiosity and inquisitiveness.” In
Borrow the “human touch is markedly absent;” “not even Isopel could break down
the barrier of intense egoism.” [9]
In part the
interest the book retains today derives from its prefigurations of modernity. The book’s very randomness suggests later
practices of conscious fragmentation and bricolage. Borrow might be seen as a proto-hip character,
anticipating an important twentieth century aesthetic category. His indifference to social norms and his
individualist adventuring make him seem a free spirit to readers in spite of
his peculiarity, aimlessness, and vulnerability to depression which he called
“the horrors.”
He remains,
diminished perhaps to a vanishingly minor figure, a fascinating curiosity, a
pleasant read, a diverting story-teller, and, perhaps most important, a
colorful character. His breadth surely
outshone his depth. Though he vaunted
his linguistic accomplishments at every opportunity, subsequent scholars have
found his mastery even of German to be imperfect at best. [10] His insouciance about form, his idiosyncratic
attitudes, his very eccentricity constitutes his appeal. [11]
The fact that this
book and its predecessor Lavengro were included in the Everyman’s Series
indicates the regard of the literary establishment for Borrow as a modern
classic a quarter century after his death. [12] He had attained a position in the literary
canon, albeit toward the margin, eliciting an oddly enduring but lukewarm
appeal from both critics and common readers.
I consider my discovery of a copy of The Romany Rye a happy
chance, unlikely to be repeated by future junk shop browsers, though it takes
but a bit of imagination to envision the Gypsy Gentleman himself sifting through the old clothes and kitchen
wares.
1. Borrow translated
the Gospel of Luke into Caló, a Gypsy dialect used in Spain and Portugal. His first book The Zincali: or an
account of the Gypsies of Spain (1841) described Romani life. Romano Lavo-lil A dictionary of the
language of the English Romanichal people (1874) has been found seriously
defective by scholars. Mérimée was
influenced by Borrow in his depiction of Carmen. The World Romani Conference has declared
the use of the name “Gypsy” to be pejorative. I use it in my title for historical reasons.
2. H. W. Boynton,
“George Borrow,” The Atlantic, Feb. 1904.
3. Edward Thomas, George
Borrow: The Man and his Books, 1912.
4. In order, the
quotations are from Theodore Watts-Duncan in Ephraim Chamber’s Cyclopedia of
English Literature 1901-3 edition in an article that runs over six
double-columned pages; Émile Legouis’ History of English Literature (1926) Andrew Lang, History of English Literature
from Beowulf to Swinburne (1921), and Thomas B. Shaw. B., A History Of
English Literature (1895).
5. John Murray, The
Life of George Borrow (1912), Iv.
6. Review of Samuel
Milton Elam’s George Borrow, New York Times, July 7, 1929.
7. George Sampson, “George Borrow,” The Concise Cambridge history of English literature (1965).
8. Sampson.
9. Arthur
Compton-Rickett, A History of English Literature (1912).
10. Though, in the
view of George Hyde, Borrow “produced some of his best poetry in his capacity as translator.” See “’Language Is First of All a Foreign One':
George Borrow as a Translator from Polish,” The Slavonic and East European
Review Vol. 77, No. 1 (Jan., 1999).
11. The most
comprehensive book on Borrow in the last generation is titled George Borrow:
Eccentric (Michael Collie, 1982).
Shortly after Borrlw’s death a little feature in the New York Times
(February 24, 1894) titled “The Eccentric Borrow” retells several stories of
his odd behavior. The writer explains
Borrow’s peculiarities as “those
unaccountable fits to which men of genius . . . are often subject.”
12. Lavengro had
already been published in in the Oxford University Press World's Classics Series
in 1904.
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