Wainewright The Poisoner
Andrew Motion
Faber, £20, 305pp
Buy it at BOL
Not much remains of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794 -1847). What does is shot beyond repair: a few paintings and sketches, including a sulky-looking self-portrait; scattered appearances in pre-Victorian gentlemen's magazines; a late-period ticket-of-leave appeal from his convict's lodgement in Van Diemen's Land.
Essentially he seems to have been a minor Romantic hanger-on, one of many small fry sizzling in the wake of mighty acquaintances. He painted Byron (a carefully romanticised version of an earlier portrait by Thomas Phillips) and knew Keats, Lamb and Hazlitt, as well as attracting the notice of a longer-lived generation of Victorian writers such as Thackeray's friend Bryan Proctor, who were able to give some account of him to a fascinated mid-century public.
Inevitably, given the rumours that gave Wainewright's reputation its gothic sheen, the artistic achievements were a sideshow to the main event. Later Victorians remembered him for a series of unexplained and sinister deaths, which coloured his memory to the exclusion of anything much else: the passing of his uncle in 1828 (which enabled the nephew to inherit a commodious property at Chiswick), the mysterious demise of his mother-in-law a year later, and finally a devious scam involving the death of his wife's half-sister a few days after the framing of a fistful of life insurance policies.
Eventually brought to trial in 1837 after a rash visit home from his French hiding place, Wainewright was arraigned on forgery charges, but no one - either during his transportation on the convict hulk or after his death 10 years later - was in any doubt of the greater guilt.
Subsequently he became a byword for Victorian notions of Romantic excess. Bulwer Lytton dramatised his career in Lucretia (benefiting from the input of an insurance company official); Dickens wrote a sensational serial, "The Hunted Man". The seal was set on Wainewright's peculiar position in the end-of-century art/morality standoff by Oscar Wilde's remark that "The fact of a man being a Poisoner is nothing against his prose" - which is true, perhaps, if not as startling as Wilde or indeed Motion appears to think it is.
No difficulty, then, in marking down Wainewright's attraction to his latest biographer. There is the irresistibly seductive vision of the Romantic extremist, plunging Byronically through a world of strychnine and high aesthetics; there are the tantalising byways populated by all manner of contemporary curios such as the artists Henry Fuseli and Theodore von Holst, the latter responsible for some highly graphic erotica. And above all there is the beguiling sense of a blank canvas - writing a life of which so little is known that a satisfyingly large amount can be inferred gives the biographer an importance which is not allowed him in those lives already commemorated by a dozen fat volumes of letters.
This is Motion's lure and his justification, but it is also his dilemma, and one which, despite all manner of graceful flourishes and a huge amount of lightly worn learning, I don't think he comes anywhere near to solving. Wainewright The Poisoner is described as an "experimental biography". Normally this kind of signposting awakens the direst forebodings. After all, the "experimental novel" tag is practically a guarantee of unreadability, and I have never studied anything calling itself an experimental poem without wanting to read the poet a lecture on scansion.
Motion's experiment, it turns out, is to use the very limited materials available as the bones of an extended confession, courtesy of his subject, with the footnotes appended to each chapter acting as a kind of brake: confirming some things, denying others and at their best providing a dialogue between fake-Wainewright and biographer (or - to be perfectly blunt about it - a dialogue between Motion and himself).
Considering this particular line of biographical attack, I should immediately declare an interest. In the course of writing Thackeray I soon identified three or four areas of Thackeray's life that I felt were crucial but where practically no information remained.
One of the most obvious was Thackeray's relationship with his wife Isabella in the years after her madness, a period when she was placed in the care of a well-disposed keeper named Mrs Bakewell. Uneasily conscious that a biographer ought to say something about the undocumented spectacle of the novelist visiting his wife in the sequestered house in Camberwell, but knowing that only fragmentary evidence existed for what was said, I ended up inventing a two- or three-paragraph "Bakewell Report" in which Isabella's chatelaine reflects on her employer's visits. At the time this seemed to me a legitimate device (several reviewers thought otherwise). But applied to a 300-page biography, especially of such an elusive and protean fish as Wainewright, it creates more problems than it solves.
The most obvious drawback, perhaps, is that the Wainewright voice, however carefully invested with authenticating references, is simply not interesting enough: goodish pastiche for a chapter or three, maybe, but, when enumerating the ranks of his arty acquaintance, not much more than a gazetteer. Throughout the book one looks for the sense of what might be called a personal myth - something that could raise Wainewright out of his world and turn him into a Romantic avenging angel rather than the also-ran we know him to have been. Somehow this never happens, and all that remains is the sense of an unreliable, disingenuous figure complaining that life has conspired against him.
From the reader's point of view, too, the whole thing is impossibly weighed down with imputation. With the criminal elements trailed in advance, we know what to expect, and consequently can only regard the artistic fragments (most of the paintings and drawings were dispersed after his death) as a preliminary to the real meat of Wainewright's life.
Which, of course, is Motion's point: the portrait of Byron and the strychnine in the soup are two sides of the same coin. And yet the Romantic extremist line never really convinces. A murderer may produce a work of art, but at the very least the knowledge that he has murdered is likely to colour and obscure any real appreciation of that art; Motion provides insufficient evidence that Wainewright had any great talent.
Though Wainewright The Poisoner is neatly done and crammed with beguiling detail, to read these accounts of seedy continental exile and the indignities of his final years in Tasmania (Wainewright had expected a light sentence in return for admitting to two minor fraud charges, but was grievously disappointed) is to hear a constant undertow of ghost voices, a sense of what the material would have made as a novel by Peter Ackroyd or A S Byatt rather than an "experimental biography" by the poet laureate.
This is not an insult: Motion's earlier The Lamberts and Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life are conspicuously well realised attempts on real lives. But for all the good intentions of this book - its refusal to be baffled by dead ends and the ceaseless crash of tree trunks felled across the pursuer's path - it has to be marked down as "honourable failure".
