Sanctuary

I suspect everyone has authors, actors, artists, musicians, dancers, what-have-you, that they don't get.  Everyone else admires the authors et al.; meanwhile, you're over there in a corner, smiling and nodding awkardly, saying, "sure, sure, absolutely," while wondering if something has gone wrong with your aesthetic sense.  It's not even a case of thinking that the Emperor is wandering about exposed to the breeze--just that, for some reason unknown to humankind, the relevant connections in your brain refuse to fire.  All of this is to explain why I approached Robert Edric's Sanctuary, his historical novel about Branwell Bronte, with extreme trepidation.  I openly admit that Edric's style and I do not get on, for reasons I will assume have to do with me instead of Edric.  Beyond that, Branwell is not a prepossessing character; the uphill battle Douglas A. Martin faced in Branwell has not become any easier in the intervening years.  It is exceptionally difficult to write a historical novel about someone whose mediocrity functions not as an index of "the moment," as such mediocrities do in Walter Scott's fiction, but as a sign of abject failure.  As in Branwell, Edric's Branwell tries to develop a narrative for himself that will somehow prove the existence of inner genius, an arc of unrecognized literary power that can be made visible in volume form.  And as in Branwell, this Branwell gets nowhere with that project, subsiding instead into paper-shuffling--or, as Charlotte says, "You gather up ancient papers and turn them into new piles, that's all" (160).  

Unlike Branwell, however, Sanctuary dramatizes Branwell's failure in the context of the disruption of rural labor at mid-century.  Conditions are poor, food is scarce, and disease is rampant; Branwell's father Patrick spends much of his time attempting to raise money for his parishioners and attending them on their deathbeds. From the very beginning, the genteel Branwell finds himself in awkward conflict with the working poor, most of whom regard him with deep-seated contempt.  The novel's first sentence--"I met a pack man on Sober Hill, leading a string of Galloways and carrying half a load himself" (11)--appears to promise a neo-Wordsworthian encounter between the perambulating gentleman and the hard-working laborer who will soon move him to tender sympathy.  No such thing happens.  Instead, the encounter both pokes holes in Branwell's unspoken but assumed social superiority (the pack man regards him coldly instead of respectfully) and, more importantly, reveals that Branwell is a deeply unsympathetic and, in many ways, uncomprehending observer of the people around him.  Within a few moments, Branwell is "already regretting all this effort of conversation" and, indeed, failing to "conceal my lack of interest in what he was saying" (12).  The Wordsworthian pose of cross-class sympathy devolves into self-centered disconnection.  And the pack man angrily calls him out on it: when, in response to the pack man's complaints, Branwell says "I see," the pack man responds, "I very much doubt that.  Your sort never do.  Or if you do, then you're careful to see only what you want to see" (13).  What's worth noting here is that Branwell, would-be author, resorts to cliche in order to escape the conversation; the pack man appropriates his language and turns it back on him to reveal its political evasiveness.  Our Branwell is not just selfish; he is also, perhaps, a rather lousy wordsmith.

Variants on this scene, which recur throughout the novel, distinguish Branwell from the poor men around him on account of their physical labor.  Branwell spends the novel doing nothing much; in fact, the narrative begins after his failed affair with Lydia Robinson and his failed job on the railway, so that the plot leaves him suspended between a past of inept action and a future of unpleasant death (which is also not represented, but merely noted in an afterword).  This necessarily raises some questions about gender--not least because his sisters are in the process of becoming famous, even though their writing is offstage and their novels never mentioned by name.  Much of the plot is devoted to stripping Branwell of the stereotypical Victorian attributes of masculinity.  ("What do you do?" [14] asks the pack man, putting his finger on the sore point.)   Branwell's endless drinking, in particular, defines him in terms of dissipation, not production or accumulation.  He has a daughter out of wedlock (a recent  biographical theory, here assumed to be fact) who dies soon thereafter, suggesting both sexual profligacy and failed paternity.  Unlike his father, he is unwilling to sacrifice himself for the good of others, especially those less well off than himself.  His career as a poet goes nowhere.  And after being dismissed from the railway, he cannot get another job, leaving him dependent on his family's charity (and Lydia Robinson's).  Indeed, his humiliation reaches its climax when he comes close to being arrested for debt, saved only by Charlotte coming up with some cash as a stopgap.  As Emily calmly informs him, "You are weak and without resolve [...] And you veer from self-pity to hysteria and back again.  You have no true comforts or guide" (219).  Emily's language implicitly feminizes him; in this family of sisters, the brother is the one who conforms to Victorian stereotypes about womanly weakness, forever requiring the others to provide him with financial and emotional support.  Even his fellow failure Leyland, a sculptor reduced to making cheap mantels, at least sends what money he has to his mother.  

The immediate difficulty posed by this characterization, of course, is that it makes Branwell hugely unpleasant company, not least because his occasional flashes of self-awareness are drowned out rapidly by his lapses back into self-pity.  "[I]t seems to me," says one character, "that you have foundered completely and that you strike out at all around you without knowing why, and without any true idea of the trouble you cause," to which Branwell can only respond, "I cause ten times more trouble to myself than to anyone else" (270); a bit later, when the subject of Leyland comes up, Branwell whines that "Why is it that everyone speaks only of him and shows such scant regard for me?" (282).  (It doesn't help that Branwell has been begging Leyland for money on a regular basis.)  Accusations and counter-accusations like this run through the novel, all of them convicting Branwell of a fundamental insensibility to the needs of others, at best, and leech-like qualities, at worst.  His imagination rarely extends successfully to the minds of others, as the termination of his romantic fantasies about Lydia Robinson suggests.  As rendered in this novel, Branwell's bathos--it's impossible to say tragedy--emerges from this character flaw, which rears its head everywhere from his sexual misadventures to his ultimately useless visit to Hartley Coleridge.  Edric's peculiar style, which has prompted my own ambivalent response to his work, is at least of some use here.  Like all of Edric's first-person narrators, Branwell is at a distance from his own emotions, narrating his feelings so that he is always performing instead of inhabiting them.  An early exchange between Branwell and Leyland illustrates what I mean: "'You instantly became--and remain--my dearest friend,' I told him.  I put my hand on his to convince him of the sincerity of this" (20).  It's the phrasing of the last sentence that does it, and which is so characteristic of Edric's work--this need for the character to self-consciously reassure himself, as well as the reader, that his language and gestures carry emotional heft.  One could argue that this strategy reveals the fictiveness involved (it's a character, of course he's not "having" emotions), but if so, the strategy also empties the character right out.  Branwell's imagination is fully occupied with the need to craft his own emotions; he doesn't have time for anyone else's.