ALL THAT HARD WORK

This column by Elinore Standard appeared in a November, 2004 Record Review as one in the ongoing "My Reading Life" series.

Works mentioned in this piece: Traces of Thomas Hariot. A Brief and True Report,



ALL THAT HARD WORK

“The Traces of Thomas Hariot” by Muriel Rukeyser (Random House, 1970) is an ambitious biography taken on by Rukeyser, (1913-1980) who is best remembered as a distinguished American poet.

Thomas Hariot, (1560-1621) – tutor to Ralegh (today an “i” is added), friend of Francis Drake and Christopher Marlowe -- went as a surveyor and historian to the New World. He set out from Plymouth as part of Richard Grenville’s 1585 expedition to explore and record the “Virginia” wilderness. Hariot’s (spelling in the 16th Century was ad hoc: one can use “Heriot”, “Harriott”, “Herriot”, “Herriott” or any variation) only surviving book, “A Brief and True Report” was the first writing in English about America. It was published in 1588, three months before the sailing of the Spanish Armada.

Respected in his day and forgotten in ours, Hariot was a mathematician, alchemist, naturalist, and astrologer who investigated intellectual powers of change and magic – enough to get anybody in trouble with the Star Chamber – and Hariot (unlike some of his close friends including Raleigh) survived a long stay in the Tower of London.

To me, “The Traces of Thomas Hariot” is as much about the process required to produce a first-rate biography about an historical figure who left little written record as it is about the figure himself. I’ve owned “The Traces of Thomas Hariot” since 1970, and I always wondered what made Rukeyser choose so difficult a subject. I get the feeling the work took on a life of its own as it progressed -- as these things often do.

She began her inquiry into Thomas Hariot while teaching poetry at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville. There are hints and glances at Hariot in work by Raleigh, Marlowe, Spenser, Roger Bacon, Donne and other Elizabethans, and Rukeyser asked herself and her students, “Who was he? Where was he to be found?” There was little written about him, but there were clues and what Rukeyser calls, “excitements”.

In the early 1960’s, she commenced a search for Hariot papers and materials in England and examined sources in museums and private libraries; the clock began running. She waited years for Hariot’s own papers to be published so that what she was saying about him could become verifiable. As she worked in the British Museum with microfilms of the Hariot papers, a fellow scholar informed her publisher that her work should not be published because Rukeyser was not consulting original manuscripts. She found another publisher. A friend wrote, “By now, it is an obsession with you, and these obsessive things sometimes turn out well.”

She hits pay dirt in the library at Alnwick, the home of the present-day Duke of Northumberland whose forebear, The “Wizard” Earl of Northumberland, had been Hariot’s patron. She had been given permission by the Duke to visit two years earlier and she appeared unannounced, acting boldly on a rather old invitation. The day came when she finally met the Duke. “He came toward us, and I began to show him the papers of his family with which I was working. I told him some of what I was after. He put his head on one side, with its legendary red hair, and the turning point of all my endeavor came. He said, ‘It’s very much like fox-hunting.”

She goes to Raleigh country in Dorset, England, and a place called “Nag’s Head”. In the U.S. she goes, as Hariot once did, across the sandbars in Roanoke Sound, North Carolina, to Kitty Hawk, Nag’s Head and Hattaras. Back in England, she meets and interviews descendants of Raleigh and Hariot and of the many others connected to the expedition.

In Madrid, Rukeyser gets access to the archives of the Spanish Duke of Medina Sidonia, to complete the account of the “other side” of the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Then back she goes to London in 1968, to Syon House, a Northumberland residence where Hariot ended his days. She discusses the possible planting of a Hariot Trail, so that the New World plants and trees described in “A Brief and True Report” might also be set out on the present-day site of Hariot’s former home and laboratory.

Years pass and one can see that as Rukeyser proceeded, she got sucked deeper and deeper into the black hole of research. You get the feeling that some of it was drudgery and a lot of it was fun. You understand that Rukeyser, a person with the time and the means, could afford the expense of foreign questing. You are aware that her own distinguished reputation as a poet and teacher gave her credibility and entrée, and you realize that she had an international network of friends and acquaintances and what they used to call “connections” in academia and publishing.

At the end of the book, there is an eleven-page partial reading list and citation of 300 sources. Her Acknowledgments list is long, including: “To Sarah Lawrence College and to my students there, whom I first set the errand of searching with me for the traces of Thomas Hariot”.
As she concludes the book, Rukeyser describes herself as “exhausted” and accepts that there are gaps in the story of Hariot she can never possibly fill. To make the challenge greater (in those pre-digital days before fax, e-mail, Google, hard-drive backup and Jet Blue), the second publisher lost her manuscript and they lost treasured illustrations. Rukeyser compares the long delays for the book with “Hariot’s long story of delay and failure.”

And you know what? I am going down deeper and deeper into my own interest in what Rukeyser went through in order to produce a responsible biography. I am much more fascinated by that process than I am by Thomas Hariot! I Google “Muriel Rukeyser” and I come up with 10,000 results! This is enough to feed the most voracious obsession! I Google “Thomas Hariot” and I find 4,700 –- amounting to many, many pages of references and endless pathways to follow. Practically all of the Rukeyser entries have to do with her poetry; few have to do with Hariot. I get tired of paging through. Unlike Rukeyser, I give up.

Elinore Standard is the co-editor of “Bookworms: Great Writers and
Readers Celebrate Reading” (Carroll&Graf, 1997).