Genius Brannii

THE INFERNAL WORLD OF BRANWELL BRONTE(336 pp.)--Daphne Du Maurier --Doubleday ($4.50).

Everyone knows of the Bronte sisters; fewer people recall that they had a brother. Yet before his 21st year, Branwell Bronte scribbled more manuscripts-plays, novels, poems-in his crimped microscopic hand than the entire published output of Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Not a line of his saw print.

He was his sisters' Muse. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and the lesser novels might never have been written if Branwell had not sparked his sisters' preteenage imaginations. Branwell himself reached manhood only to disintegrate. Ravaged by gin, opium, epilepsy, and an anguished sense of guilt, he died at 31. Branwell's own dying words might have been spoken by a more melancholy Sydney Carton: "In all my past life I have done nothing either great or good."

Something About a Soldier. Branwell's sad saga ought to have made a more compelling story than Novelist Daphne Du Maurier has made of it. She is too busy justifying Branwell to do psychological justice to his twisted life. As a boy, Branwell was startlingly precocious. At eight, he could commit a page to memory on a single reading, repeat a lesson verbatim, store away names, dates, and places with faultless recall. Ambidextrous, he could write two letters at once. His proud, high-strung curate father had been left a widower with six small children, five of them girls (the two oldest later died of malnutrition at boarding school), and he yearned to be a soldier, away from the gloomy, death-haunted rectory of Haworth on the moors.

When Branwell got a box of toy soldiers as a present, he and his sisters gave them individual names and then went on to weave fantasies and adventures around them that would shortly turn the rectory into a feverish, secretive writers' workshop. They dubbed themselves the Four Genii: Genius Tallii (Charlotte), Genius Emmii (Emily), Genius Annii (Anne) and Chief Genius Brannii (Branwell). The writing began when Branwell was twelve, and the first two toy-soldier games, "The Young Men's Play" and "The Islanders" (in which each child peopled an island with heroes of his own choice) fused into a game called "African Adventure," in which the soldiers, wrecked on the Guinea coast, fought the natives, established a colony and partitioned it into twelve kingdoms. Little, redheaded, myopic Branwell, aflame with invention, drew maps of the colony, drew up a constitution, manned the kingdoms with leaders, statesmen, newspaper and magazine editors.

Love in Northangerland. Branwell and Charlotte were the chief collaborators, but in the next eight years the Four Genii produced hundreds of thousands of words.

What went on through these tales over the years was the gradual metamorphosis of the toy soldiers into the characters that would one day be famed. Charlotte's soldier Wellesley would become Rochester, lover of Jane Eyre. Parry, Emily's soldier, was Heathcliff. Anne's soldier Ross would become Arthur Huntingdon, whose wife was The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Branwell's soldier Squeaky, destined to become the unknown Alexander Percy, Earl of Northangerland, had the most checkered personal history of the lot. He acquired three wives, a French mistress, an illegitimate daughter who died in childhood, and a king, with whom he feuded, for a son-in-law.

Sickness Unto Death. While the secret writing of the "infernal world," as the Brontes called it, had put the sisters in fine fettle for their novelistic careers, it seems to have left Branwell exhausted and doubtful of his gifts. Formally unschooled, perhaps because of his epilepsy, Branwell hoped, but failed, to enter the Royal Academy of Arts. He tried, and failed, to make a living as a portrait painter, as a railway booking agent (the station master drank ten pints of beer before breakfast, and Branwell shortly matched him), as a tutor. From this last job, he was fired for making advances to his employer's wife, and from then on Branwell pleaded blighted love as an excuse for everything.

The last years included a last bitter comedy. Under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, the sisters had their books published, with Charlotte's Jane Eyre an instantaneous bestseller. The girls thought that they were keeping their brother in the dark. He knew, but out of a remnant of pride pretended not to know. Yet anyone may guess how much the knowledge hurt Chief Genius Brannii. Though an agnostic, if not an atheist, Branwell could never banish the terrors of death and hell with which his father's brimstone sermons had filled him. His poems deal with little else. Yet in his brief life, he experienced something worse, what Kierkegaard called "the sickness unto death." In one of his poems, Branwell took the measure of his own torment:

Why dost thou sorrow for the happy dead?

So turn from such as these thy drooping head

And mourn "dead alive"--whose spirit flies--

Whose life departs before his death has come--

Who finds no Heaven beyond Life's gloomy skies.

Who sees no hope to brighten up that gloom;

'Tis HE who feels the worm that never dies--

The REAL death and darkness of the --tomb.

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