Review: "Vivian Grey," a novel by Benjamin Disraeli

After Benjamin Disraeli had begun to serve in Tory leadership roles in the House of Commons, he complained to a friend in 1853 that the Conservative backbenchers, largely composed of country aristocrats, could not be counted upon to read a book:

“They could not be got to attend to business while the hunting season lasted … they had good natural ability … but wanted culture; they never read, their leisure was passed in field sports … they learned nothing useful, and did not understand the ideas of their own time.”  (Source: The Foundation of the Conservative Party, 1830-1867 by Robert Stewart.)

Later, in 1870, after he’d been prime minister, Disraeli put that complaint in the mouth of a character who states with dripping irony that what he loves about aristocrats is “that they live in the air, that they excel in athletic sports, that they can only speak one language, and that they never read.” But when Disraeli first began to think of breaking into politics, he seems to have had the opposite impression of aristocrats. When at 22 years of age he had his first novel, Vivian Grey, published anonymously in 1826, many critics clamored to guess which member of the aristocracy had written it, claiming the novel revealed inside knowledge of the nobility. One critic, however, correctly figured out that the author of Vivian Grey was no aristocrat because he was too well versed in literature to have been a nobleman: “This ‘somewhat smacks’ of the ‘literary writer,’” he wrote of Vivian Grey. “We should have the idea that the class of the author of Vivian Grey was a little betrayed by his often recurrence to topics of this sort, about which the mere man of fashion knows nothing and cares less.”

Vivian Grey turns 200 years old next year, and nothing like it has been written since by a future statesman. Twenty-one years ago, the publisher Routledge issued a new edition of Vivian Grey bursting with new scholarship across two introductions, hundreds of footnotes notating all of the hungry young author’s literary, political, philosophical, scientific, architectural, musical and theatrical allusions, as well as hundreds of pages detailing the fascinating differences between prior editions of the novel, as the first volume of its six-part series The Early Novels of Benjamin Disraeli. If Google and JSTOR are to be believed, no one the world over reviewed it. This is unfortunate, as the edition represents the best way in 200 years to enjoy this witty, manic-depressive, overstuffed, audacious, sometimes perspicacious, often silly, ridiculous and revealing look at the psychology of a future superstar of world statesmanship.

Disraeli had the idea that all this showing off would earn him entry to the world of high society, and strangely enough it eventually did. As the Routledge edition’s editor, Michael Sanders, points out in his fascinating and thorough introduction, the young author wrote in the novel that the only routes into “the society of the great” were blood (which he lacked; his father was middle-class, a noted author and a great socialite among the literary classes but not among the nobility), fortune (which Disraeli tried to acquire first with disastrous investments in South American stocks and second with an equally disastrous entrée into the world of newspapers, leaving him deeply in debt almost until the day he died), and genius (which he acheived). This novel, Sanders says, was his attempt to make it into society via genius. When the first four books of the novel were anonymously published, Disraeli’s book became the talk of the town. The reviews were great – until the author was revealed to be a 22-year-old upstart from what he called “middling” beginnings. After that, critics turned on it.

But Disraeli’s name had been made. He even wrote a sequel, which is now always bundled with the first volume as one novel. As the great Victorian scholar John Vincent put it, “This sequel is so different in mood and style, not to say merit, that mankind has universally disregarded the second volume.” Most critics fail to say almost anything about it at all. But both parts of the book are worth looking back at as its 200^th birthday approaches. The second half is even more stuffed with allusions than the first half. Disraeli seems to have learned his lesson in his later books: The later novels are packed with references, for example, to “the Opera,” but outside of one reference to the composer Donizetti in Tancred, they omit any reference to specifics. So it’s a delight to see Disraeli talking about composers and operas by name and in detail in Vivian Grey. He also discusses novels (Gil Blas seems never to get enough love for Disraeli’s tastes; neither does Tremaine by Robert Plumer Ward), philosophers (the neo-Platonists are the source of particular punchlines, as well as the philosophes Voltaire, Rosseau and the Germans Kant, Fichte and Schelling), historians (Gibbon, Thucydides, Plutarch), politicians (the Duke of Wellington, Canning, Croker), architects (Brunellesco, Palladio, Sanmichele), scientists and astronomers (Aristarchus, Linnaeus, Galileo), visual artists (Cimabue, Vecellio, Corregio), and on and on. Robert Blake once said Disraeli was no intellectual, citing his public response to Darwin, which was to proclaim himself “on the side of the angels” and not on the side of evolution. But the 21-year-old Disraeli was certainly trying hard to look like an intellectual.

Vivian Grey is about ambition, primarily ambition to power, and the onslaught of allusions reflect the fact that the title character’s ambition is autobiographical. Disraeli famously said that “in Vivian Grey I have portrayed my active and real ambition.” The character arc for Vivian goes from Machiavellian ambition to chastened depression and humility, back to manic ambition again. The plot follows the young dandy Vivian Grey as he attempts to build a political party at 21 by manipulating the aristocratic Marquess of Carabas, who is based upon the publisher John Murray, a former friend he had wheedled into launching a conservative newspaper in the 1820s before it collapsed, leaving both men out thousands of pounds. (Murray, who also published Byron and Jane Austen among many others, felt the characterization in Vivian Grey of the Marquess was libel, and the Routledge edition nicely documents the transition from Disraeli’s entertaining treatment of the Marquess as a hapless drunk in the original 1826 edition to his much kinder treatment in the 1853 edition.) Vivian’s plans collapse when the adults begin to behave as dramatically as he does, and by the end of the first part of the book Vivian accidentally kills (in a duel) a friend and collaborator based on another figure from his newspaper days. In the second part of the book, a devastated Vivian retreats to Germany to heal his emotional wounds. The real Disraeli had traveled Germany in 1824, but he did write the sequel to Vivian Grey while traveling elsewhere in Europe, after a spot of ill health not unlike Vivian’s.

It has been observed that the young Disraeli showed signs of bipolar disorder, and it’s no surprise that in 1853 the seasoned political pro issued an edited version of the book that cut out much of the evidence of his violently swinging moods. In the sequel to the original Vivian Grey, in a passage the senior Disraeli had excised from later editions of the book, the narrator admits the characterization in the first was autobiographical but points out defensively that it was a portrait of the author as he was and not as he is:

“Of the literary vices of Vivian Grey, no one is perhaps more sensible than their author. I conceived the character of a youth of great talents, whose mind had been corrupted, as the minds of many of our youth have been, by the artificial age in which he lived. The age was not less corrupted than the being it generated. In his whole career he was to be pitied; but for his whole career he was not to be less punished. When I sketched the feelings of his early boyhood, as the novelist, I had already foreseen the results to which those feelings were to lead; and had in store for the fictitious character the punishment which he endured. I am blamed for the affectation, the flippancy, the arrogance, the wicked wit of this fictitious character. Yet was Vivian Grey to talk like Simon Pure…?”

And yet several chapters later, Vivian declares that “my ambition is so exalted that I cannot condescend to take anything under the Premiership.” It may be in part a joke, but it reflects a change that earlier ruminations by the narrator delineate: He had decided that his earlier Machiavellian approach to ambition was the product of inexperience, but then having met the successful Mr. Beckendorff, who Disraeli said was based on the crafty conservative Austrian statesman Metternich, he sees an example of Machiavellian ambition in a man he can hardly claim is inexperienced.  

Seminal Disraeli biographer William Monypenny questioned whether the young author was sincere that he had intended Vivian to get his comeuppance from the beginning, arguing somewhat convincingly that the portrait of the more ambitious version of Vivian in the early chapters of the book was too sympathetic for the claim to be believed. But in any case it is true that Disraeli had already begun an introspective analysis of whether the end of gaining power justified the means of manipulation. Vivian Grey has been ranked as the #22 best novel of the 19^th Century, ahead of his much better books Coningsby (#37) and Sybil (#47). This is exactly backwards, but it reflects the importance of the novel to the century and to Disraeli, who was known by Vivian first and in some ways most enduringly. One might say that Disraeli’s reputation for lacking principle and for Machiavellian tendencies in politics stems primarily from his own characterization of himself as Vivian Grey.

In addition to the plot about ambition, there are also some perfunctory romances, but they aren’t where the young Disraeli’s heart is. At one point he writes of Vivian: “He looked upon marriage as a comedy in which, sooner or later, he was, as a well-paid actor, to play his part; and could it have advanced his views one jot he would have married the Princess Caraboo tomorrow. But of all wives in the world, a young and handsome one was that which he most dreaded.” Disraeli’s novels have been used to argue that he was gay or bisexual, most notably by William Kuhn in The Politics of Pleasure. Indeed while there is nothing overt to satisfy the prurient, an inquiring mind finds Disraeli sometimes seeming more comfortable writing gay than straight. Vivian’s relationship with the enigmatic Mrs. Felix Lorraine makes less sense as the romantic interest she briefly becomes than when she behaves like a modern day best straight friend to Vivian’s best gay friend: “Is Mr. Cleveland handsome?” she gushes to Vivian. “And what colour are his eyes?” Vivian gives her fashion advice, which she eagerly laps up: “Allow me to recommend your Ladyship to alter the order of those bracelets, and place the blue and silver against the maroon. You may depend on it, that is the true Vienna order.” “The blue and silver next to the maroon, did you say? Yes; certainly it does look better.” When their relationship turns romantic, the pair begin speaking stiltedly in quasi-Shakespearean speeches, as though the Bard’s romantic scenes were all the 21-year-old Disraeli knew of love.

Sanders points out the book is rarely credited as a comedy, but nearly every page is full of jokes: “Mr. Grey, I wish you could get me an autograph of Mr. Washington Irving,” says one of Vivian’s female friends. “I want it for a particular friend.” Vivian replies, “Give me a pen and ink; I will write you one immediately.” Often the humor takes the form of Wildean paradoxes, in which a statement seems absurd but reveals a deeper truth. Vivian's love interest Violet Fane, for example, remarks: "Is it so unprincipled to break an appointment? I think it is one of the most agreeable and pleasant habits in the world! No young man is expected to keep an appointment." The book was of significant influence to Oscar Wilde decades after its publication, and Wilde is said to have called the novel "chaos illuminated by flashes of lightning," which is about right. One scene with Horace Grey, one of the novel’s best characters and a seemingly accurate portrait of Disraeli’s own father, the novelist and literary historian Isaac D’Israeli, is written with the fast-talking moralistic and comedic flair of Aaron Sorkin. Young Vivian, studying for a year in his father’s house just as Disraeli did in his own father’s 25,000-volume library, has begun reading philosophy at a precocious age. Horace launches into a long monologue discouraging him from delving too deeply into that corner of philosophical history at the expense of his duty to humanity, and then puts what Sorkin has called a "button on the scene," a distinctive characteristic of his comic rhythm:

“’Father! I wish to make myself master of the latter Platonists. I want Plotinus, and Porphyry, and Iamblichus, and Syrirnus, and Maximus Tyrius, and Proclus, and Hierocles, and Sallustius, and Damascius.’

“Mr. Grey stared at his son, and laughed. ‘My dear Vivian! are you quite convinced that the authors you ask for are all pure Platonists? …  Try to ascertain, when you are alone, what may be the chief objects of your existence in this world. I want you to take no theological dogmas for granted, nor to satisfy your doubts by ceasing to think; but, whether we are in this world in a state of probation for another, or whether we cease altogether when we cease to breathe, human feelings tell me that we have some duties to perform; to our fellow creatures, to our friends, to ourselves. Pray tell me, my dear boy, what possible good your perusal of the latter Platonists can produce to either of these three interests? I trust that my child is not one of those who look with a glazed eye on the welfare of their fellow-men, and who would dream away an useless life by idle puzzles of the brain; creatures who consider their existence as an unprofitable mystery, and yet are afraid to die.

“’You will find Plotinus in the fourth shelf of the next room, Vivian.’"

Horace, as some have argued, is the moral center of the book, and this loving portrait of Disraeli’s dad suggests that Disraeli’s heart is more than just a Machiavellian shell bereft of principle. In fact, the closest Disraeli gets to a specific prescription for political policy in the book comes when he rescues an agricultural tenant from the callous slumlord Stapylton Toad. And Sanders argues that moments edited from the book constitute a young Disraeli reflecting youthful radicalism that the elder Disraeli, now a Tory leader, edits out.

Both Disraeli and Vivian Grey left school, which agreed with neither. The headmasters at Disraeli’s school described his as a “foreign and seditious mind, incapable of acquiring the spirit of the school,” which Sanders points out echoes the language used by school authorities in book one chapter four of Vivian Grey. I’d add that it also provides an intriguing explanation for one of the more enigmatic statements Disraeli ever made about himself, that “My mind is a revolutionary mind. It is a continental mind.” Scholars debate the meaning of this odd line, which hints again at a radicalism. But it appears no one has pointed out that Disraeli was reclaiming the language used derisively about him as a child by his headmasters.

The book is not without its innovations: it represents the first time anyone used the word “millionaire,” and the first time the word “crony” was used as a verb. (Also, or so it seems, the last, but the usage makes some dictionaries.) But Vivian Grey’s greatest value is the insight it provides into the character of this young genius, especially when that insight is provided unwittingly. The Routledge edition treats us to flights of manic fantasy that Disraeli later had cut. In moments the young author can barely contain his energy and nearly abandons his story:

“I had intended to have commenced this book with something quite terrific - a murder, or a marriage: and I find that all my great ideas have ended in a lounge. After all it is, perhaps, the most natural termination. In life surely man is not always as monstrously busy, as he appears to be in novels and romances. We are not always in action—not always making speeches, or making money. or making war, or making love.”

A few paragraphs later he is rambling about “THE PURPLE EMPEROR”, a butterfly that briefly figures in one of Isaac D’Israeli’s novels, a touching tribute but absolutely without context. And finally he is on about a dog, in a passage much derided by critics in 1826:

“Now Hyacinth, now my Hyacinth, now my own dog; try to leap over me! - frolick away, my beautiful one: I love thee, and have not I cause? What confidence have you violated? What sacred oaths have you outraged? Have you proved a craven in the hour of trial? Have I found you wanting when I called. or false when I fondled? Why do you start so my pretty dog? Why are your eyes so fixed, your ears so erect. Pretty creature! does any thing frighten you? Kiss me, my own Hyacinth my dear, dear dog! Oh! you little wretch! You've bit my lip. Get out! I'll not speak to you for a fortnight.”

In fact, in the end (spoiler forthcoming!) it is the manic rambling that wins out. In the final paragaphs of the book, Disraeli confesses he had planned to keep writing but decided instead that he has written too much already:

“Here leave we Vivian! It was my wish to have detailed, in the present portion of this work, the singular adventures which befel him in one of the most delightful of modern cities - light hearted Vienna! But his history has expanded under my pen, and I fear that I have, even now, too much presumed upon an attention which, probably, I am not entitled to command.”

All this rambling rocketing from mood to mood is almost enough to back the perception that bipolar people often end up the most successful. And to ratify the impression of William Gladstone, Disraeli’s great parliamentary rival, who when he read Vivian Grey concluded that the first quarter of the book was exceedingly clever and the rest of it “trash.” But these deviations from what works best in the book are not only anomalous—they are also among the best insights into the mind of the young Disraeli, which is probably why he cut them and why this edition, which restores them, is so valuable.