The Vine...

 

V.

“Iram indeed is gone with all its Rose,

And Jamshýd’s Sev’n-ring’d Cup where no one knows;

But still the Vine her ancient ruby yields

And still a Garden by the Water blows"*

Amazing as Omar’s poetry is, this is still a two-man act: without Edward FitzGerald we would probably not know anything at all about Omar Khayyam.

Edward FitzGerald was born Edward Purcell in 1809. As heir to his family’s fortunes, he didn’t have to work and needn’t have turned his hand to anything during his lifetime – he was fated to become the ultimate Gentleman of Leisure. Fortunately, he was possessed of a hungry intellect which needed constant feeding and he found an outlet in studying languages, particularly obscure ones.

The family fortune was based on Irish estates. His mother inherited close to half a million pounds from an aunt; when her father died, she inherited considerably more than this, making her family one of the wealthiest in England at the time. In 1818, the family adopted the name and arms of FitzGerald’s mother’s family; throughout his life, FitzGerald insisted upon the Irish spelling of his name, with the capital ‘G’. Despite the Irish connexion, he lived at a time when the burgeoning Home Rule revolution in Ireland was in its barest infancy and so was able to ignore the rumblings of unrest during his lifetime. He buried himself in study and books, developed a firm circle of friends in academia and dedicated himself to his own intellectual interests.

The FitzGeralds had moved to France and lived in St. Germain and Paris until the death of his mother’s father forced them to return to England. Edward was sent to school at Bury St. Edmunds before moving to Trinity College in Cambridge to continue his studies in 1826. There he moved in literary circles and met William Makepeace Thackeray, William Hepworth Thompson and Alfred Lord Tennyson. Keeping faith with a death-bed promise he made to the Quaker Poet Bernard Barton in 1849, he married Barton’s daughter Lucy in 1856; unfortunately, the marriage was a disaster and they separated after only a few months

After graduating, he re-located to Suffolk with his family and lived nearby them during several shifts, finally settling at his own abode, “Little Grange” near Woodbridge. He rarely left the county thereafter, absenting himself for only a couple of weeks at a time if necessary. He dedicated himself to his interests in flowers, music and literature. He developed a tendency to mark his place in his books with banknotes, and it’s highly likely that his servants availed themselves of this ready cash whenever it suited them (it’s also a windfall bonus for book collectors who focus on his collection).

Unlike his high-flying literary friends, FitzGerald’s written output was fairly modest. He wrote a sentimental reflection of his University days entitled Euphranor in 1851 followed by a collection of trite epigrams entitled Polonius in 1852. Having begun the study of medieval Spanish poetry in 1850, he freely-translated and published Six Dramas of Calderon in 1853. Thereafter he began to study Persian at Oxford under Professor Edward Byles Cowell. He published a version of the poet Jami’s Sálamán and Absál, translated into Miltonic verse in 1856. Then Cowell sent him a set of Persian quatrains from the Asiatic Society Library in Calcutta by a little-known poet named Khayyam; dissatisfied with his previous efforts in the language, FitzGerald fell eagerly into this new task. “Hafiz and Omar Khayyam,” he wrote, “ring like true metal”. The rest, as they say, is history.

For the rest of his days, FitzGerald kept to himself and his country projects. The interest that his translation of Khayyam finally generated moved him to re-working the piece several times but it could hardly be called his driving passion. Instead, he bought a half share in a herring trawler and spent much of his private time ‘mucking about in boats’ towards the end of his days. Many have said that he was more interested in his business partner – a humble fisherman named Joseph Fletcher - than the business of fishing, and many poisonous comments have been launched at their relationship without any supporting evidence, especially from Robert Graves, whose efforts at deriding FitzGerald - as we shall see - left him firmly hoisted upon his own petard.

 

 

 

*According to FitzGerald, "Iram [was a garden] planted by King Shaddad and now sunk somewhere in the sands of Saudi Arabia. Jamshýd's Seven-ring'd Cup was typical of the seven Heavens, seven planets, seven seas, etc., and was a Divining Cup."