World Enough and Time

Nicholas Murray, World Enough and Time, The Life of Andrew Marvell (Little, Brown)

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Even though much of the remaining documentary evidence of Shakespeare's life might suggest he was both parsimonious and litigious in his property dealings, most biographers insist on showing him as a sweet-natured, well-balanced paragon of charm. It is much more difficult for one writing Marvell's life to swerve the numerous reports of hot temper, scurrilous satire, 'haughty and insolent' manner and the rewriting of his own history because that is most of it but Nicholas Murray's highly readable book makes a fine attempt at achieving a fair and sensible balance.

By no means all of Marvell's life was literary and much of the detail here is taken from his years as M.P. for Hull and his ongoing pamphlet wars with Samuel Parker, Bishop of Oxford. He represents an odd but still faintly recognizable strain of English liberalism, a staunch defender of religious tolerance and yet deeply anti-Catholic, puritanical and sceptical of others in ethical questions but quite capable of quickly over-writing his support for Cromwell after the Restoration, referring to his 'usurped and irregular government'.

He landed a wonderful job in the Commonwealth in 1657, as assistant to Milton as Latin Secretary, translating, drafting and deputising for the blind senior man, but he was clever enough to see ahead with a survivor's instinct where his best opportunities lay and after Cromwell's death he shifted his ground quite radically but successfully.

In the best tradition, he was an amateur poet, and one is left to wonder how important his literary work would have seemed to him when he is now remembered almost exclusively for it even though his life is here rather more a slice through the politics of the English revolution. His poems seek after solitude while his life was spent in busy London at the centre of government. His use of gardens as a metaphor for art versus nature runs parallel to the juxtaposition of solitude and sophistication, the orderliness of his verses a further, cultivated irony on his celebration of innocence and the pastoral. As a writer, he is highly literary and stylised, with art always a consideration above sincerity.

His work involves sitting on any number of committees and he reports back to Hull, lobbying for a lighthouse at Spurn Head and apparently conscientious in his representative duties, which are admittedly more to the businessmen of Hull than to the people as a whole. But he becomes increasingly anti-Royal and critical of corruption in Parliament, too, as the glorious restoration went quickly to bad. His puritan conscience, or perhaps just his urge to express himself in his chosen forthright manner, led him to make many enemies and he might have worried for his own safety. Some of the more controversial pamphlets against popery were published anonymously and even though he died of a fever, theories about his possible murder were inevitable when the physician's remedies had the opposite of the intended effect.

But Nicholas Murray's Marvell is not without some redeeming features. Thanks to Parker, we see him drinking wine alone at home 'to refresh his spirits and exalt his Muse'; he enters a poetry competition for the newly completed Louvre but doesn't win; he might have turned down a lucrative position under the king on principle when rumoured to be living in relative poverty and he doesn't marry or leave any traceable emotional attachment to posterity. And it is to Murray's credit that this last factor isn't allowed to dominate his book.

There's much to admire in Marvell's difficult, self-contained, rigorous attitude and much to like about Murray's account of it, too.