Keats and Me

A friend of a friend recently asked me what I thought of John Keats. In 2009, I was cycling down Grafton Road, near Gospel Oak in north London, on my way to Birkbeck College where I’d just started a job. As I was cycling, I was listening to a podcast from the New York Review of Books: it was a conversation between the literary critic Christopher Ricks and editor Giles Harvey about Stanley Plumly’s Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography (2008). Plumly was a poet (he died in 2019), and his biography offers not a chronological life but a fragmented, impressionistic account. ‘I wanted to walk around in Keats’ life and art,’ Plumly wrote, ‘not simply through them.’ Ricks’ voice came down a very bad phone line and he sounded like he was speaking from the 1950s.

Grafton Road was quiet – it was mid-morning – and I passed Kentish Town City Farm on my left as Ricks started to read a poem by Debora Greger. I liked it immediately. It was called ‘Her Posthumous Life’. The poem’s narrator was Fanny Brawne, writing long after the death of her fiancé Keats, after she had married a wine maker’s clerk and become Mrs Lindon, but speaking to her children about the young man she once knew who wrote her poems. ‘I thought little of it / at the time, but you will have heard his name.’

Fanny Brawn, circa 1850 (photograph on glass)

Just past Carlton Primary School, a car pulled out of Queens Crescent, into my path. I put on my breaks hard and stopped short of the car, which, noticing me, had itself lurched to a standstill, but my bike stopped so suddenly that I flipped over the handlebars and landed on the road. The driver of the car shouted at me. A cyclist behind me, who I hadn’t previously noticed – on a racing bike, and in Lycra cycling gear – shouted at the car driver, and when the car pulled away aggressively – I was sitting up on the road, not yet standing – the cyclist said something to me which I couldn’t hear and then followed the car in equally aggressive pursuit. That was the last I saw of either of them. All of this was about a mile from Keats’ House in Hampstead. I lifted up my bike. I picked up my bag. My i-Pod with its black headphones attached was scattered across the road several yards away. It looked like a snake. When I retrieved it, Ricks was still talking: he’d finished reading the poem and was saying thanks to the host. ‘Thank you very much Giles: goodbye.’ I wasn’t injured but I had the particular sense of shame that a bike accident induces. The result of this is that whenever I read Keats’ poems or letters or biography – or when a friend of a friend asks me what I think of John Keats – this is my starting position, the set of contingencies from where my engagement with Keats begins: the aggressive driver, the flip over the handlebars, the tinny voice of Christopher Ricks carrying on from the tarmac.

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You can listen to the New York Review of Books podcast via Internet Archive here, with Debora Greger’s lovely ghostly poem at around 14 minutes.