Opportunity lost

Biography:Shaped by the Renaissance and the Reformation, and involved in revolution and a republic that beheaded a king, John Milton (1608-74), servant of the short-lived Commonwealth, was a man of his times.

As a boy obsessively reading the classics and delighting in Latin and Greek poetry, he had decided he would become a great poet. In preparation for his destiny, he spent six years after university secure in his father's house, studying, in rehearsal for this self-appointed role. Yet he would also respond to history unfolding and pursued a political career, nurtured by his daring opinions and consolidated by his mastery of Latin. It was he who defended, in Latin, Protestant regicidal England from a disapproving Catholic Europe. In time, Milton's politics returned to haunt his old age.

His story is that of an England that underwent three major transformations as well as a civil war during his lifetime, an England that rejected the monarchy only to restore it. As a young poet, when his contemporaries were still aspiring to John Donne's metaphysical wit, Milton developed a highly individual, passionate lyrical pastoral voice, influenced by Homer, Virgil, Ovid and Dante, though clearly his own. His greatness, culminating in the epic splendour of Paradise Lost, remains undisputed.

All of which makes Anna Beer's somewhat breathless and cliched biography irritatingly disappointing. It is as if Beer, an Oxford fellow, has deliberately set out to avoid scholarly, academic prose and has attempted instead to write in a conversational, slangy, forensically speculative jargon that is neither natural to her nor stylistically pleasing to read.

This, combined with her inquisitorial, repetitive, quasi-rhetorical approach, asking questions in the absence of fact, as well as her being apparently overwhelmed by the abundant historical sources, and uncomfortable about the lack of personal material, causes her narrative to flounder in a grey area between sketchy history writing, pseudo-psychological biography and some haphazard textual sequences such as a superficial, exam-notes-like race through Paradise Lost.

Milton was a career writer, a gifted classicist poet but also a political pamphleteer and propagandist. He served the Commonwealth as Secretary for Foreign Tongues. Looking to the public rather than the private, he seldom wrote about his personal or domestic life - he records the births and deaths of his children - nothing more. Aside from a wonderful detail about a letter he wrote to an Italian friend describing his "almost perpetual loneliness", there are few personal clues, no crazed love affairs left for the aspiring biographer to feast upon. He never forgot, however, that his first wife's dowry never arrived.

In the absence of diaries, personal letters or material directly relating to Milton, Beer frequently draws on references written by other men in similar situations and presents them as ways of interpreting Milton's life experiences. Why? Here was a detached, disciplined, shrewd and generally unpopular genius who wrote about divorce, who was married three times - always to younger women, two of whom died - who barely knew his three surviving daughters and who praised the importance of compatibility while never really abandoning his ambivalent attitude to sex.

Central to his ambition was the abiding tragedy of his life: his blindness. It is the one subject on which we have Milton's view of what was happening to him. Beer makes good use of it and quotes Milton, whose sight began failing at 36, recalling the initial appalling discovery some 10 years on:

"I noticed my sight becoming weak and growing dim, and at the same time my spleen and all my viscera burdened and shaken with flatulence. And even in the morning, if I began as usual to read, I noticed that my eyes felt immediate pain deep within and turned from reading, though later refreshed after moderate bodily exercise; as often as I looked at a lamp, a sort of rainbow seemed to obscure it. Soon a mist appearing in the left part of the left eye (for that eye became clouded some years before the other) removed from my sight everything on that side."

Aside from the obvious difficulties it placed on Milton as a writer, reader and political player, it also made him vulnerable to attack from his many enemies who saw his blindness as an act of God, the price of his political sins, ignoring the fact that Milton had been reading into the early hours since he was a child and as an adult suffered from gout. Beer quotes the opening lines of the great sonnet "When I consider how my light is spent". The blindness comes to dominate the biography as it did the life and the descriptions of Milton's despairing efforts to conceal his affliction are moving.

BUT THEN, THERE are Beer's habitual heavy-handed, sweeping statements, invariably stating the obvious, at times at the expense of logic: "Accused of being short and ugly, he pointed out that he was no such thing . . . admittedly he was not tall, but he was not short, and in any case, even if he were short, it would not be a problem." What is the point of such observations? "Milton the blind bard, looking inward rather than outward, has remained an enduring image into our own time, his disability somehow connected with his greatness, or used to further the notion of the isolated creative genius. Greatness and genius, yes: but no author, least of all John Milton, worked in isolation in the 17th century." Her point is that many writers, sighted or otherwise, availed of diction and that one of life's pleasures is being read to.

Beer accepts there is no evidence to support the old schoolroom claims that he dictated Paradise Lost to a devoted daughter. "An awful lot of myths surround these daughters," writes Beer, "very few of them verifiable, and many derived from testimonies given in a problematic legal case after Milton's death." It appears that Milton was not close to any of his three daughters, the eldest of whom was disabled. Beer makes several references to the lack of information about these girls. But that does not prevent her making superfluous statements such as "It would be a nice thought that John Milton wanted his daughters to join this happy throng of economically happy women, but it is unlikely."

Period biographies often prove to be as strong on social history as on the character under scrutiny - John Stubbs's exhilarating biography of John Donne, The Reformed Soul (2006), is a superlative example of an authoritative biographer dealing with a subject of whom no living acquaintances remain. Stubbs, in the pursuit of the mercurial Donne, evoked the glorious squalor of Elizabethan London while brilliantly bringing to life an artist whose work "is an extended dialogue with the world around him . . .".

Admittedly, for sheer colour Donne, his various escapades and his family are inspiring stuff. It would take a skilled biographer to cajole a living Milton off the pages without resorting to fiction, but Beer does not possess sufficient flair for the task. Her flat, distant Milton remains the peevish Milton we thought we all knew, a little more petty, a little less heroic. There is no diminishing his work, though.

Milton was the son of a scrivener who had made most of his money by lending it. Young John wanted for little - except perhaps a sense of humour. Milton senior was a talented musician who lived to be "83 or 84". Beer could have made more of him as well as of young John's early years, his Cambridge career, his apprentice versifying and prose writing and particularly his travels in Italy which could not really have been as dull as she describes it. Milton experienced real danger and also met the then 75-year-old and almost completely blind Galileo. Instead, Beer concentrates on an intense relationship with a young man which may or may not have been sexual, which was immortalised in Epitaphium Damonus, while elsewhere she quotes a reference concerning "his virtuous and sober life".

Just as Lucifer is the leading man of Paradise Lost, Oliver Cromwell emerges as the potential hero of this chatty, scatty biography. Beer follows the Roundhead leader on his ruthless path, as Beer notes "he knew God was with him", adding "in 1656 Cromwell was not really listening to anyone but God . . . [ Cromwell] was starting to look very much like a King [ sic]." It appears that although Milton served him, he was also wary of Cromwell. Just when it seems that Beer may be preparing to offer her portrait of Cromwell, she writes: "The most important factor in the demise of the Protectorate was the death of Oliver Cromwell on the afternoon of 3 September 1658 in the Palace of Whitehall". She adds little, aside from the rumours announcing he had to be buried quickly because the body was already "corrupt."

THROUGHOUT THE ACCOUNT of revolution, civil war, the Republic and the way in which that Republic became known, following the Restoration, as the Interregnum, Beer offers random asides about Milton's home life. His first wife left him after a month to return home to her parents, and returned to Milton after three years, only to die seven years and three babies later; his second wife seemed content, but died 14 months after the wedding. None of it really gives a sense of Milton. Beer has a handful of personal facts which she repeatedly tosses in the air and refers to again and again, particularly the dearth of information on his daughters. We know he had property and had become landlord to his first in-laws. After the Restoration, his first wife's family, loyal Royalists, flourished, while Milton went into hiding, was then briefly imprisoned and rejected as a spent force. From this low point began the final burst of greatness, the Protestant epic from the poet who believed God respects free will.

Milton lived in strange times. Shakespeare's England yielded to the Puritan revolution of civil war, with its menacing righteousness, which was followed by the renewed excesses of court life as Charles II began to party with a vengeance. Birth more often than not meant death. Plague rampaged through Milton's beloved London, causing 7,000 deaths in one week in 1665. Bizarrely, according to Beer, the Great Fire claimed only five recorded deaths, "such was its slow-moving nature". Milton was religious, but his true faith was the politics of power and morality, his intellectual legacy his major preoccupation.

In this, the 400th anniversary of his birth, Beer's book is timely, but its knowing tone does not help. The strength of the story lies in the sheer vibrancy of the sprawling settlement that was post-Elizabethan London. At the heart of this was St Paul's, which appears to have been an arts centre, market and meeting place, presided over, in Milton's early years, by Donne who held the deanship from 1621 until his death a decade later when Milton was 23.

Beer acknowledges the influence of Spenser and Shakespeare on Milton, yet never makes the obvious comparisons between Milton's political career and that of Chaucer. Lacking the dangerous seductiveness of Donne, the forthright eccentricity of Swift, or the barbed playfulness of Pope, Milton, Protestant poet and political conduit, remains securely within an intellect that both protected and imprisoned him, defying any biographer as unsubtle and uninspired as Beer to penetrate the enigma.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot By Anna Beer Bloomsbury, 400pp. £20

Milton 1608-2008

CambridgeThe Milton 400th anniversary celebrations at Cambridge University, where he was a student, include the Lady Margaret Lectures devoted to him from January 30th to November. Lecturers include Quentin Skinner, Geoffrey Hill and Christopher Ricks. Exhibitions and performances include a reading of Paradise Lost on October 23rd.

LondonThe Ninth International Milton Symposium (July 7-11) will celebrate the quartercentenary of the poet's birth in Bread Street, London, with a five-day conference under the auspices of the Institute of English Studies, University of London. Fringe events include the unveiling of a plaque commemorating Milton at Bread Street. There will also be events during the year at St Giles-without- Cripplegate, the church where Milton is buried.

OxfordAn exhibition, Citizen Milton, already running at the Bodleian Library, continues until April.

See http://www.christs.cam.ac. uk/milton400/