Alfred Noyes

63

Alfred Noyes : biography

16 September 1880 – 28 June 1958

The Last Voyage

Before Noyes had begun proper work on the final volume in the trilogy, The Last Voyage, two events occurred which were to influence it greatly: his first wife’s death and his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Death is a major theme in The Last Voyage, as its very title suggests. The tone, more sombre than that of its predecessors, is also more religious — though religion was hardly absent from the earlier volumes — and, as might be expected, more specifically Catholic.

The Last Voyage begins at night in mid-Atlantic, where an ocean liner, "a great ship like a lighted city", is battling through a raging storm. A little girl is mortally ill. The ship’s surgeon prepares to operate, but with little hope of success, for the case is complicated and he is no specialist. Luckily, the captain knows from the wireless news that a top specialist from Johns Hopkins is on another liner 400 miles away — within wireless range. The ship’s surgeon will be able to consult him, and stay in touch with him throughout the operation. Suddenly, the little girl’s chances of survival are much improved. In a manner of speaking, all the scientific discoveries and inventions of the past are being brought to bear in the attempt to save her life. When the poet asks a casually-met fellow-passenger, "You think they’ll save her?" the stranger replies, "They may save her," and then adds enigmatically, "But who are They?"

Reflecting, the poet realizes that They are all the seekers and discoverers of scientific truths through the ages — people like Harvey, Pasteur and Lister in the field of medicine or Faraday, Maxwell and Hertz in the development of the wireless. Nevertheless, despite the united efforts of all, the little girl dies, and in the darkness of that loss the poet finds that only in Faith can a flicker of light be found. Science cannot defeat death in the long run, and sometimes, as in the little girl’s case, not even in the short run, but if "Love, not Death" is the ultimate reality, death will not have the final word. Of course, the "last voyage" of the title is not just that of the little girl or of Noyes’ wife — though there are lyrics mourning her in Section XIII and another in the Dedication at the end — but of everyman and everywoman.

F. S. Marvin, who reviewed all three volumes of The Torch-Bearers for Nature, wrote that "the third volume is certainly the best from the artistic point of view. It contains one well-conceived and highly interesting incident, around which the author’s pictures of the past and incidental lyrics are effectively grouped, and it leads up to a full and eloquent exposition of the religious synthesis with which the history of science inspires him."Marvin, F.S. , Nature 127 (7 March 1931).

First marriage and America

In 1907, Noyes married Garnett Daniels, youngest daughter of U.S. Army Colonel Byron G. Daniels, a Civil War veteran who was for some years U.S. Consul at Hull. Noyes first visited America in February 1913, partly to lecture on world peace and disarmament and partly to satisfy his wife’s desire that he should gather fresh experiences in her homeland. His first lecture tour lasted six weeks, extending as far west as Chicago. It proved so successful that he decided to make a second trip to the U.S. in October and to stay six months. In this trip, he visited the principal American universities, including Princeton, where the impression he made on the faculty and undergraduates was so favourable that in February 1914 he was asked to join the staff as a visiting professor, lecturing on modern English literature from February to June. He accepted,, The New York Times, February 26, 1914. and for the next nine years he and his wife divided their year between England and the U.S. At Princeton, Noyes’ students included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. He resigned his professorship in 1923, but continued to travel and lecture throughout the United States for the rest of his life. His wife died in 1926 at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France, where she and Noyes were staying with friends.Stanford, Derek. , The Catholic World, Vol. 188 (January 1959): 297-301.

Second marriage and Catholicism

In 1927, the year after his first wife’s death, Noyes married Mary Angela née Mayne (1889–1976), widow of Lieutenant Richard Shireburn Weld-Blundell, a member of the old recusant Catholic Weld-Blundell family, who had been killed in World War I. Later that year, Noyes himself converted to Catholicism. He gives an account of his conversion in his autobiography, Two Worlds for Memory (1953), but sets forth the more intellectual steps by which he was led from agnosticism to the Catholic faith in The Unknown God (1934), a widely read work of Christian apologetics which has been described as "the spiritual biography of a generation".. Originally published in The Book of Catholic Authors, Walter Romig, Sixth Series, 1960. In 1929, Noyes and Mary Angela settled at Lisle Combe, on the Undercliff near Ventnor, Isle of Wight. They had three children: Hugh (1929–2000), Veronica and Margaret. Noyes’ younger daughter married Michael Nolan (later Lord Nolan) in 1953.