James Thomson: The City of Dreadful Night. Canongate Classics. 77 pp.
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The Port Glasgow poet James Thomson began the four-year work on his great pessimistic poem "The City of Dreadful Night" early in 1870. Two months previously, as his 35th birthday loomed, he had burnt all his private papers. It was all he could do "after this terrible year", he wrote in his diary. In his helpful
18-page introductory analysis to this solitary reprint of the poem, Edwin Morgan writes "Why 1869 was 'terrible' no one has been able to explain". This particular statement needs redressing.
Two people of significance to Thomson's life had in fact recently died, and Thomson's future in November 1869 was not promising. Joseph Barnes, friend and surrogate father in Thomson's youth, had died at the end of October 1868. Then in June 1869 Thomson's close friend since the 1850's and fellow literature enthusiast, James Potterton, died aged 34 of tuberculosis. Thomson's only income as a clerk was under threat, and was soon to be lost in the firm's bankruptcy. He had been forced to borrow money a number of times; and had begun drinking again "after a year's abstinence". Previously his repeated abandonment to drinking bouts had been such as had necessitated his being searched out and brought home "bruised and wounded" to be nursed for some days. There was no one, in Thomson's solitary lodgings in 1869, to search him out or nurse him now. All these factors may of course have been in addition to something unknown. But evidence enough has been published to indicate reason for sad personal evaluation.
If a source of biographical impetus need be required for the central pessimism in "The City of Dreadful Night", then the "Dead faith dead love dead hope" leit-motif in the poem - a reversal of the "faith, hope, charity" of 1 Corinthians, favourite book of his mother's millenialist Irvingite companions - may be interpreted as emblematic of the "spiritual, physical and mental illness" that some take as a definition of alcoholism. For these, "The City of Dreadful Night" may be interpreted, across the century, as "Jimmy's Story". That impending city of the New Jerusalem for which his mother yearned - and which was further proclaimed as imminent by Rev John Cumming, closely associated with the London asylum where Thomson was reared - was a dream unrealised.
But dream is the appropriate word: for "The City of Dreadful Night" can be seen as the bitter terminus of that medieval Dream Tradition in which the poet falls asleep to dream of fair women in the Garden of Love. William Dunbar had satirised that tradition in his "The Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo". In Thomson's epic, the dream is entered without even the salve of sleep; in place of a garden, there is a city of deranged males, in darkness; overlooking the city sits the sad female figure of Melancolia.
I am sure a case can be made for "The City of Dreadful Night" as a kind of pre-monitory "green" poem, presenting the world of the Redundant Male abandoned to urban industrial darkness, having in the name of "progress" banished the Female, and the Organic. Others will picture a lonely universe of male repetitive-compulsive behaviour; of men who have rejected a God obsessed with sex and physical retribution - but who have found that self-diagnosis is not the same as cure and release; and whose lapses into compulsion can be seen as the private rituals of a futile quest.
The truth is that the great mystery and balance of "The City of Dreadful Night" is such that people will find in it what they want to find in it, and will exhume that buried subtext which they imagine makes them party to the exclusive under-standing at which Thomson, in his preface, avowedly aims. One indisputable cause for celebration: here at last after a mere 120 years, this great Scottish masterpiece has at last been published in Scotland.