Books: The Poet As a Young Corpse CHATTERTON

• Share

Encouraged by applause, the teenage performer runs off to the big city. But his early popularity vanishes as quickly as it arrived. Increasingly isolated and destitute, he takes a chemical overdose and dies before his 18th birthday. Only then is his talent recognized.

This prototype of the self-annihilating artist seems yet another casualty of the rock culture; in fact, Thomas Chatterton perished in a London garret in 1770. Pondering the tragedy, William Wordsworth labeled him "the marvellous boy," and Samuel Johnson burbled, "It is wonderful how the whelp has written such things." Not all the appraisal was so rhapsodic. Horace Walpole called Chatterton "an instance that a complete genius and a complete rogue can be formed before a man is of age." Genius because Chatterton's verses were so prodigious, rogue because the young poet once wrote in an archaic style, artificially aged the paper, then claimed to have discovered the works of a bogus 15th century monk.

Ambition and false identity, suicide and posthumous fame: these are the ingredients of high romance, and it is no wonder that investigators periodically ransack the material of Chatterton's brief career. The latest is Briton Peter Ackroyd, 38, biographer of T.S. Eliot and a novelist who specializes in the blending of history and imagination. In Hawksmoor he shuttled between the 18th century and the present. Chatterton ventures deeper ! into the time warp. It unfolds in contemporary England, concludes in the late 1700s and dallies in the Victorian epoch when an artist named Henry Wallis painted a dramatic portrait, now in the Tate Gallery, of the poet as a young corpse. The model for Chatterton was also an apprentice writer: George Meredith. Not long afterward, Wallis ran off with Meredith's wife Mary Ellen.

This tumult of passion, literature and coincidence belongs in the Dickensian tradition, and so does Ackroyd. The protagonist of his crowded and exuberant novel is another cursed poet, Charles Wychwood. One afternoon he comes across an old painting showing the marvellous boy as a middle-aged man. Curious, he begins to pore over some obscure manuscripts. They suggest that Chatterton faked his early death, then continued to write more verse under more assumed names, among them William Blake and Thomas Gray. "The greatest plagiarist in history?" inquires a colleague. "No!" Wychwood argues. "He was the greatest poet in history!"

Or the greatest con artist. Throughout the narrative, nothing is as it seems. Wychwood's employer is an author who, it turns out, has plagiarized her books. His wife works for an art gallery where the paintings are palpable forgeries. Meanwhile, as the narrative flashes forward and back, parallel lies are occurring in other times and places. Meredith is being deceived; so are those who subscribe to the Chatterton myth.

Ackroyd sometimes overstates his satire of scholarship and art -- Chatterton's death by poison comes not out of despair but in the hope of finding a cure for the clap. Yet the poet himself is a poignant re-creation, and the supporting cast of irrepressible eccentrics might have tumbled from a chapter of Pickwick Papers. On a train, Wychwood literally devours a novel, rolling the pages into balls and popping them into his mouth.