BIOGRAPHY: William Hazlitt: The First Modern ManBy Duncan Wu, Oxford University Press, 557pp, £25
HE WAS A writer who would have preferred to be let think all day rather than to write.
Rising at noon, breakfasting on copious amounts of tea and bread and butter, he would then sit morosely staring into the fire until the early evening when he would either go out into the London streets, maybe to play hand-tennis at the Fives Club or to visit a bawdy-house. Or, he would, reluctantly, begin to write .
This is a tantalising and revealing picture of William Hazlitt and it appears so concretely in no other biography of him. It's obvious from it that Hazlitt was a complex fellow. But it is not a picture that Duncan Wu capitalises on. Sadly, Wu evades the complexities of his subject, his primary impulse is to defend, even sanctify him.
Hazlitt is one of those writers - Beckett is another - whose intense inner circle of followers could be said to have a cultish aspect. They are keenly possessive of him, have a tendency to impute treachery and Toryism to any criticism of him (just as Hazlitt himself would in his day) and to reverence him as a kind of secular saint.
Which is not to say that he's not hugely admirable. That he is one of the great essayists is beyond question. he has that gift - which equally displays his complexity - of suiting his style to his subject. On injustice he is incandescent, on his own problematic nature meditative and rueful; biting, even venomous (and the word is his own) on the shortcomings of his fellows, lyrical when he is gratified or moved by nature or the daily pleasures of life.
As Wu points out, he created the imaginative and empathetic style of modern criticism, in art, literature and even sports-writing. he could be fiercely prejudiced and even deluded, but he was always truthful. In his writing there's an immediacy and urgency that remains fresh and compulsive.
As regards humanity and his wishes for it of liberty and fraternity (though not égalité) his heart was in the right place. That he never betrayed these principles of his youth was his great pride and he held in contempt those - his erstwhile friends and well-known writers of the day such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, for example - who did. These days the rush of his supporters to defend him seems partly to be about compensating for the hatred he had to put up with as a result. The monarchist and conservative press harried and insulted him at every turn and more than once destroyed his reputation - and his book sales - with personalised attacks.
Actually Hazlitt gave as good, if not better, than he got. He was no embattled Simon Pure. Lurid invective and attack was the journalistic manner of the day and when it came to indulging in it he wasn't behind the door. He just did it more elegantly. A strength of Wu's book is that he details, for instance, Hazlitt's broken relationship with Wordsworth and Coleridge, a break that must have caused him great emotional injury. Though it was in truth based more on his sense of personal betrayal, of a ganging-up against him, than on what he regarded as their contemptible politics. He lay in wait for their publications and reviewed them with a lofty vituperativeness.
"Everlasting inconsequentiality marks all he does," he wrote of Coleridge. Wordsworth he depicted as a hater, a crazy egotist who "hates all that others love and admire but himself". No wonder shocked letters flew the length and breadth of England. Wordsworth refused to go to any house where Hazlitt might be, which was why Hazlitt was not present at the "immortal dinner" given by the painter Haydon for the artistic names of the day though he would have been a very interesting guest.
His loyalty to his principles was his justification for his disloyalty to his friends.
Godwin, Southey, Sir Walter Scott were all in the end clubbed by his pen. It's hard not to agree with an enemy of his who said he liked to cause pain. As for Sarah Walker, the love of his life, he could hardly have done her greater damage than to expose and denounce her in his kiss-and-tell account of their relationship, Liber Amoris.
When I was writing The Far Side of a Kiss, a novel about this relationship, I was bemused by the disdain and an obtuse absence of sympathy for Sarah Walker displayed by Hazlitt biographers. Only one - not coincidentally perhaps a woman - Catherine Macdonald Maclean, was able to recognise her predicament. And, also perhaps not coincidentally, Macdonald Maclean, despite her insights into Hazlitt's psychology and indeed her great tenderness for him, is not cited in the bibliographies of subsequent biographers.
WEIRDLY, IT SEEMS to me, considering our relative enlightenment about sexual matters, Duncan Wu outdoes them all in obtuseness. He is so partisan that he adopts the attitudes of some moralistic figure from the 19th century. Sarah, Wu says, was a teaser, an instinctive game-player, a woman who devised ways to torment and persecute and deceive a man. Hazlitt's words for her - words written in obsessional frenzy - he repeats without examination: "a snake, a succubus, a lodging-house decoy". She was "monstrous", he states. Since Sarah Walker was a 20-year-old girl and Hazlitt was a married man of 40-something (and otherwise experienced as well - that one of Sarah's duties was to show street-girls up to his room is presented as a discredit to her rather than to him), who was monstrous to whom is surely open to question.
The attitude to Sarah Walker and Liber Amoris seems to me to be a touchstone in Hazlitt biography. Hazlitt, the disappointed lover, might be forgiven for being blinkered and self-serving. But for a biographer to adopt his account at face-value without any assessment of the realities does not inspire trust.
This is not to see Hazlitt whole or plain. There are occasional asides from Wu that suggest how intriguing and contradictory a personality he was - timid and arrogant, self-absorbed and generous, sensitive and hurtful - but nowhere does he attempt a psychological analysis. The result is yet another manifesto of the Hazlitt party.
Hazlitt needs one of those great but rare biographers who would be willing to get to grips with him as a man as well as a writer. It's such a pity that yet another opportunity has been missed.
Anne Haverty's novel The Far Side of a Kissis published by Vintage. Her most recent novel , The Free and Easy, is also published by Vintage