December 02, 2008
Gomer Pyle Coleridge (1793)
Fleeing his debts and an unhappy love affair, 20-year-old Samuel Taylor Coleridge flees Cambridge University for the life of a soldier. After swearing his friends to secrecy, he enlists in the King's Light Dragoons, hiding from his family under the pseudonym of Silas Tompkin Comberbache.
Unfortunately, the future author of "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" behaved less like dashing Harry Flashman and more like Beetle Bailey. He could read Shakespeare and Milton and won a gold medal at Cambridge for an ode on the slave trade, but literary skills were of little use in the cavalry. Although he was incompetent in the areas of spit-and-polish, he could confess his shortcomings eloquently. When a drill sergeant asked, "Whose dirty rifle is this," Coleridge said, "Is it very, very dirty?" The sergeant said yes. "Then it must be mine." And as a rider, his attempts ended frequently in disaster: "Within this week I have been thrown three times from my Horse, and run away with to no small pertubation of my nervous system." He developed saddle sores, "dreadfully troublesome eruptions, which so grimly constellated my Posteriors."
Eventually, for the sake of his posteriors and the king's horses, Coleridge was assigned guard duty, where he traded his ability to write letters for illiterate soldiers who took care of his equipment. According to Thomas de Quincey, it may have been about this time that he came to the attention of the officers:
Coleridge, as a private, mounted guard at the door of a room in which his officers happened to give a ball. Two of them had a dispute upon some Greek word or passage when close to Coleridge's station. He interposed his authentic decision of the case. The officers stared as though one of their own horses had sung "Rule Britannia."After several months, possibly moved by pity, one of Coleridge's friends told his brother. Although mortified at being found out — "what shade of necessity is there to excuse you in shewing my letters - to stab the very heart of confidence!" he wrote — Coleridge became grateful that his family was coming to his rescue. They paid his debts and negotiated with the army for his release. In return, the army, after five month of Coleridge's presence, was probably happy to let him go. After an attempt to find a substitute fell through, Silas Tompkyns Comberceck was declared insane and discharged.
Coleridge returned to Cambridge, where he was reprimanded, confined for a month to the college, and ordered to translate 90 pages of Greek into English. One assumes, for the rest of his life, Coleridge never went near a horse if he could help it.
Born: Nikos Kazantzákis, poet, novelist, Iráklion, Crete, Ottoman Empire, 1885; Joseph Bell, physician, Sherlock Holmes inspiration, Edinburg, Scotland, 1837; William Wegman, artist, photographer, Holyoke, Mass., 1943; T(homas) Coraghessan Boyle, novelist, short-story writer, Peekskill, N.Y., 1948; Ann Patchett, novelist, Los Angeles, 1963.
Died: Marquis de Sade, novelist, iconoclast, Charenton lunatic asylum, near Paris, 1814; Edmond Rostand, poet, playwright, Paris, 1918; Nordahl Brun Greig, poet, playwright, novelist, war hero, over Berlin, 1943; Philip Larkin, poet, Kingston-upon-Hull, England, 1985; Stephen Potter, humorist, critic, 1969; Robertson Davies, novelist, playwright, essayist, Orangeville, Ontario, Canada, 1995.
Quote for the Day: "They're the muse, but I'm also their muse. I'm what they like to study; they're like what I like to study. I wonder if, in their mind, they imprint me and composing pictures of their beloved Bill." — William Wegman, Weimaraner photographer, artist, who was born today in 1943.Also from the "Writers 365" project:
- Rabbie Burns stands for fornication (1786)
- Gibbon finishes Decline and Fall (1787)
- John Milton rises from the grave (1790)
- France Loses Its Head (1793)
- Slaughter in England (1598, 1796)
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