This dramatic monologue deals with issues of memory and truth—but from a rather unusual perspective. The speaker is the prospective biographer of a Victorian writer. In working on his subject’s life, he discovers something about his own motivations and anxieties, and reveals how his attitude towards the writer changes. There are several large recent biographies of Victorian writers that could lie behind this poem. The most famous one is possibly Ellman’s biography of Oscar Wilde, but one thinks also of Peter Ackroyd’s 1990 biography of Dickens. The sort of biography that Duffy is describing is one very unlike the early Victorian responses to these writers, which were anecdotal, and sometimes rather bowdlerised versions of their lives.  In these large modern biographies, the biographer tries to get as close to his subject as possible, finding out every detail of the writer’s life through letters and other clues. Robert Browning’s poem ‘House’ records his distaste for this kind of biography. A modern poet’s treatment of the same subject can be found in Thom Gunn’s ‘The Dump’ (http://www.diacenter.org/prg/poetry/98_99/gunn.html ) written after the death of Robert Duncan, where he compares the activities of modern literary biographers to those of people rummaging through a rubbish dump.

This aspect of the poem reminds me of A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession, a work that similarly examines the motivations of biographical literary criticism. In Possession, several academics investigating the lives and works of two Victorian poets discover something new and unsettling about the subjects of their study. The desire to find out something new, to somehow ‘own’ the subject through letters and manuscripts, is tempered by a realisation that the academics bring their own expectations and preconceptions to the study, and are not always happy to have them overturned. To find out more about Possession, a useful site is http://www.sjsu.edu/depts/jwss.old/possession/

Like the subjects of Possession, the writer in the poem cannot be certainly identified as any known Victorian writer. He seems to be a compilation of several figures, including elements of poets and novelists.

Within Mean Time this poem connects closely with ‘Café Royal’, another poem where someone seeks to connect with an unreachable Victorian past.

The Biographer

The emphasis is immediately on the person writing, not on the subject of the biography. Does this suggest how the writer is really writing about himself? The poem is going to tell us more about the speaker than about the ostensible subject of his speech.

Because you are dead

The speaker addresses his dead subject directly—it is a classic element of the dramatic monologue to have a silent listener. It is only because the subject of the biography is dead that the biographer can be there in his house, touching his things—it is also the only reason that he is interested in the subject. The writer becomes more interesting because he’s dead (cf. dead poets in the title of the film Dead Poets Society, their death indicating they’re accepted into the canons of literature).

Caressing

One of many words that suggests the sensual interest of the biographer in his subject

The grooves in the wood your initials made

The writer, perhaps bored, or like a naughty school child, has cut his initials into the lid of his desk.

I manage a quote

The speaker forces out a quote—he feels that it is appropriate here, but it does not come naturally, it is not the easy voicing of a thought that springs to mind. Perhaps it is an effort to remember something that he feels is fitting.

Echo one of your lines

The speaker is in many ways echoing the writer throughout. He is not an original, he is following in the footsteps of someone else.

Daguerreotype

An early form of photograph. Invented in 1839, this dates the writer as a Victorian.

Excitedly staring out from behind your face

The first of a series of references to masks made by the speaker. The writer is seen as more than the visible face, the biographer thinks that he can see his subject’s soul ‘the thing that made you yourself’. The writer is seen as vivid and excited by life—even though he is dead. The ironic contrast with the speaker becomes more clear as the poem progresses.

Like a hood and a cloak of light

The writer seems, to the dazzled imagination of his biographer, to have a visible aura, a radiance in which he is dressed. The idea that especially charismatic people have an aura of light that can be seen under special circumstances is one with a distinguished history. The depiction of a saint’s halo is one manifestation of this belief. The fact that this glow about his subject is expressed in terms of clothes might make us think that the biographer is ambitious to ‘wear’ this same cloak of light, to be deeply himself as his subject is. Kirlian theory, first developed in Russia in 1939, and subsequently developed by UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) researchers, states that this aura is a manifestation of the body’s electromagnetic field that can be caught on camera, the colour and state of which denotes our physical, mental and spiritual health.

The first four words that I write are your name

Like many biographers, the speaker starts the book by stating the full name of his subject. The four names are suggestive of elaborate Victorian names ‘Oscar Fingal O’Flaherty Wills Wilde’ for instance. The poem starts when the biographer is thinking about writing the book, and moves through to its completion and publication in the final stanza.

I’m a passionate man

A confident assertion—passionate about his subject? Or about other things?

With a big advance

This is one of the important things about him, in his own valuation of himself. An advance is a sum of money given to a writer by a publishing firm, before they write a book, which is to be set against future profits of that book. A big advance suggests that the publishers are confident of enormous sales.

Who’s loved your work since he was a boy

This comes last in the speaker’s priorities. Nonetheless, the sense that he has a pre-existing imaginative relationship with the writer is important. He has ideas about his subject that are ready to be shattered.

I slept alone in your bed

The biographer seems to be trying to get into the mind of his subject by re-living his life: standing at his desk, sleeping in his bed (echoes of Goldilocks?) and eventually copying his behaviour.

The end of a fire going out in the grate

In the preserved house of the writer there is no modern heating. To share in the imagined experience still more vividly, the speaker has a fire lit in the writer’s bedroom, as would have been customary in Victorian times. The image of the fire going out as he goes to sleep makes it a chilly, lonely image.

You wouldn’t have wanted me…would barely have noticed me

This sudden self-knowledge reminds us of ‘Café Royal’ again, where the protagonist of the poem sees that he ‘fades away’ before his idol. The rejection, though imagined, is bitter and alters the speaker’s attitude towards his subject.

I felt your dislike/chilling the air/as I drifted away

Both speaker and writer are ghostly. The writer’s imagined dislike ‘chills’ the air, as the presence of ghosts is supposed to do. But it is the speaker who ‘drifts’ away, ghostlike. ‘Drifted’ may also enact apparent disinterest.

Your wallpaper green and crimson and gold

Reminiscent of Wilde, again—the opulence associated with the decadence of the end of the 19^th century—or possibly just the Victorian love for these heavy, rich colours. William Morris was a key figure in the vogue for richly coloured wallpapers. See http://www.thecore.nus.edu.sg/landow/victorian/morris/artov.html for more details

The sound of your voice

Recovering the sound of the poet’s voice has been a preoccupation for some academics. Although we have (for instance) fragments of Tennyson reading part of ‘The charge of the Light Brigade’, these early recordings are very damaged and unclear. The texture and intonation of the poet’s own voice, something often taken as integral to an understanding of a modern poet’s work, is often something we can only guess at from contemporary remarks. (See Stefan Hawlin’s excellent article  ‘Browning’s Voice’ in Browning Society Notes

Or "Eliot Reads The Waste Land: Text and Recording." in Modern Language Review 87.3 (1992): 545-54.)

Emma Elizabeth Hibbert

An imagined contemporary of the poet, who describes his voice in some detail. Before the age of widely available sound recording, such remarks were commonplace

in someone attempting to describe a speaker. Similar references to poets like Tennyson and Browning survive in contemporary letters and journals. Cf. Max Beerbohm’s remark of Wilde, who said that he had ‘a mezzo voice, uttering itself in leisurely fashion, with every variety of tone’. (Ellmann, p. 37)

Cockney, a little

I.e., with a London accent. Keats was described as a ‘cockney’, as indeed was Browning. It was sometimes seen as a term of disparagement. Keats is said to have become deeply depressed when John Gibson Lockhart wrote a review article for Blackwood’s in 1817 that stigmatised him as a member of the "Cockney School" of poetry, which was castigated for the humble birth and allegedly boorish practices of its members as well as for poor verse. Robert Browning was described as having a ‘cockney’ accent.

London Town

An old-fashioned usage, perhaps suggesting a romanticised version of the city.

The faces you wrote

As though he created the faces—not ‘wrote about’, but ‘wrote’, like ‘made’. The writer is seen, like Dickens, perhaps, to have been someone who concentrated on the seamy side of London, writing about the poor and disadvantaged. Walking through modern London, the speaker sees the same type of people.

A stew and tangle of rags

The person is not even dignified by a name or an indication that they are a person. They are just personified ‘rags’. ‘stew’ is another, old-fashioned name for brothel. The word suggests something hot and tangled in this context.

Sniffed by a dog

As though for food?

Hungerford Bridge

A railway bridge in London. Famous from an 1861 etching by Whistler (see right). In 1845 it was opened as a footbridge for pedestrians. The scene suggests that the speaker is trying to literally trace his subject’s footsteps.

The shadow I cast…the meagre shadow

This is a momentous encounter. The writer is spat at by the beggar who represents his subject’s own subject. It is as though the writer himself is rejecting him. He spits at his shadow (a traditional way of cursing someone), and the speaker thinks of it as a ‘pitiful’ shadow—because in comparison to the great subject of his biography, he is a shrunken figure, one without stature or dignity. He will not cast a great shadow when he is dead, he is metaphorically in the shadow of his subject, overshadowed by him.

I heard the faraway bells of St. Paul’s as I ran

The opposite to Dick Whittington, in the popular children’s story, who, leaving the city, hears the bells of London call him back, with the chime ‘Turn again Dick Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London’. The real Dick Whittington was a mercer supplying luxury fabrics to the royal court; he also lent money to the King, and was Mayor of London four times between 1397 and 1420.

Maestro. Monster. Mummy’s boy / My Main Man

Four views of his subject—or of himself. Maestro means ‘master’, usually master craftsman or artist. ‘Mummy’s boy’ is a derogatory term, suggesting that someone has not grown up and is somehow effeminate. ‘my main man’ means, the person I acknowledge as my favourite or my superior: the person I look up to, my best friend.

I write you and write you

Cf. l. 38, ‘the faces you wrote’. An act of creation rather than of record.

Five hard years

Literally, the length of time it takes to write the biography started in the last line of stanza 1, made to sound like a prison sentence ‘five years hard labour’

an affair with a thespian girl

cf. Dickens's affair with Ellen Lawless Ternan, an actress in a company that he had a financial interest in. The speaker again feels that he is in some sense repeating his subject’s life.

Snivel

Cry, whimper. Used often of children, it is an undignified word. It suggests his weak submission to his wife.

Her poems and jam

Domestic security is suggested by his wife’s occupations. She makes jam (like a member of the Woman’s institute—a rather old-fashioned occupation) and perhaps writes poetry herself (is she more creative than her husband?)

Her violent love

The speaker’s wife scares him with the intensity of her love, perhaps also with her anger. For another example of a snivelling, apologetic husband, a forgiving wife, and her violent love, see Browning’s late poem ‘Beatrice Signorini’ (in Asolando).

And this is a life

Referring both to the biography—it is ‘a life’ of its subject—and to the life of the biographer while he is writing it. ‘This is a life’ is an ironic remark, almost a question ‘is this a life’ about his own occupation. Is it worth being called a ‘life’ or not?

I print it out / I print it out

Enacting the repetitive action of the computer printing out the author’s text. There is a sense that he is stamping out the parameters of ‘the life’. Having something established in print, to an extent, makes it seem more real.

In all of your mirrors, my face

As though in the writer’s house again (cf. stanza 1), the speaker is looking in his subject’s mirrors, and seeing his own reflection. Here it is literal but also metaphorical, remembering the mirroring of the writer’s life earlier in the stanza. It is as though the biographer has turned into his subject.

Quizzical

Questioning, perhaps challenging. The eyes of the speaker do not trust what they see.

Its cheekbones, its sexy jaw

The speaker dispassionately catalogues each part of his face as though he is a stranger to it. He notices particularly those aspects that are associated with male attractiveness—eyes, cheekbones, jaw, smile. ‘Smallish’ undermines the ‘eyes’, but gives a sense of precision to the description. ‘Sexy’ is an unforgiving ironic comment on his looks—in other words, this is what the world, those who only read the outside of a book, will see. He is superficially attractive, but has no real validity in his own eyes.

Talentless dustjacket smile

The biographer’s final assessment of himself. Compared to his subject, he seems to be shallow. The dustjacket is the detachable paper cover of a hardback book, which has on it the blurb and often a brief biography of the writer, with accompanying photo. The smile is false, ephemeral, because it is for the dustjacket, not really part of the book itself. The image suggests how the writer feels himself to be somehow removed from the book he has written, as though he exists only on the outside of it. It enacts a deep unease about his position in the world, and his right to be an author.

The poem connects in interesting ways to the poem following it in Mean Time—‘The Windows’—which starts ‘how do you earn a life…’ as though the issue of how to become real, how to earn a real life is still a live issue for Duffy. It also connects significantly to the poem before it, ‘Fraud’, another poem about taking on the mask of someone else’s personality.