Edward FitzGerald and Khayyam's Rubaiyat

In the decade before Edward FitzGerald’s death in 1883, his Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, which failed to sell a single copy when it was first published in 1859, became the fashion, and brought its elderly, shy, obstreperous author a measure of unwanted fame. In the decade following his death, it became the rage: ‘editions and apparatuses . . . clubs and eulogies . . . wreaths and odours and panegyrics’ as Edmund Gosse put it. Gosse himself was no stranger to the Omar Khayyam Club, whose convivial spirits would not allow FitzGerald’s to rest in peace until his grave at Boulge had been planted with a rose from the veritable Omar Khayyám’s Persian tomb. In the early twentieth century the poem was spoken of as one of the two or three best-known in the English-speaking world; ominously perhaps, it was also spoken of as the poem you would find on the shelves of people who knew no other poetry. Then the fever died down, and as it did so something odd happened to the fabric of the Rubáiyát. It became brittle, and collapsed into a heap of phrases. The last generation for which the poem was a ‘standard’ was probably the one born in the 1920s, and its taste is reflected in the 1953 edition of the Oxford Book of Quotations, in which, as Dick Davis observes, ‘there are 188 excerpts from the Rubáiyát . . . virtually two-thirds of the total work’. This is certainly an index of popularity, but also of the way in which the ‘total work’ had become less than its parts. And parts are more easily swept away. Today only a few remain — ‘A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse, and Thou’, ‘The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, moves on’ — amid a dust of exotic or finde-siècle hedonism: nightingales and roses, sultans and sheikhs (there are no sheikhs), caravans and camels (there are no camels), and Aesthetic poseurs saying things like ‘Ah, fill the Cup’ and addressing each other as ‘Moon of my Delight’.

What makes it worse is that none of this was FitzGerald’s fault. He did not initiate, encourage, or slyly collude in the inflation of the poem’s literary or commercial value; indeed he resisted it, to the exasperation of his British publisher, Bernard Quaritch, who had to watch American pirates making off with ‘his’ booty. The shredding and cheapening of the texture of the poem would have struck FitzGerald as a high price to pay for a popularity he never sought, but if that in itself was a milestone on the road to oblivion he would not have been surprised. In 1872 he referred to the Rubáiyát as ‘that Immortal Work which is to last about five years longer’.4 He lived long enough to realize his mistake, and to refer with a rueful shrug to his ‘illustrious Fitz-Omar name’.5 But it is not hard to imagine the surprise (and, to be honest, hostility) with which he would have greeted this, or any, scholarly treatment of his work. When Quaritch suggested reprinting the first and second editions in a single volume, FitzGerald replied that this ‘would be making too much of the thing: and you and I might both be laughed at for treating my Omar as if it were some precious fragment of Antiquity’. Readers, too, may look at the disproportion between FitzGerald’s text and the apparatus of an edition such as this, and echo Prince Hal’s reaction to Falstaff’s tavern bill: ‘O monstrous! but one half-penny-worth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack!’ True, FitzGerald was the poem’s first editor; he issued it with an introduction and notes, and never reprinted it without them. But it would be disingenuous to take advantage of that fact. I can only plead that the Rubáiyát is, for us today, a ‘precious fragment’ of a Victorian age which is receding into ‘Antiquity’ at a vertiginous rate.

Imperialism, Domination and Cultural Voyeurism