Читать книгу A House of Air - Hermione Lee - Страница 26

In 1984, Ann Thwaite wrote, most successfully, the biography of Edmund Gosse, the Man of Letters. Now she has made a close study of another almost extinct profession, the Great Man’s Wife. It was a role that could end tragically, as it did for the second Mrs Watts, who had to live on in the painter’s house and studio for more than thirty years after his death, while his reputation faded to almost nothing. Emily Tennyson only survived her husband by four years, giving her time to work, with her son Hallam, on the two volumes of Memoirs.

They first met each other as Lincolnshire children. She was the daughter of Henry Sellwood, a Horncastle solicitor; he came from the disastrous Rectory family at Somerton. She did not marry her Ally until she was thirty-six years old. By this time the worst of his financial troubles were over (although he had formed a chronic habit of grumbling about money), and a few months later he was appointed Poet Laureate. But for the past seven years the two of them had been eating their hearts out, while her well-meaning father forbade them to correspond. Sellwood was thinking of the drinking and smoking, the restlessness, the black moods and indeed the ‘black blood’ of the Tennyson family, the father an epileptic drunkard, one brother in an asylum, another one violent, a third addicted to opium from Lincolnshire’s homegrown poppies. Beyond this, Emily was a steadfast believer, while Tennyson was tormented and unresolved, particularly over God’s reason for creating sin and suffering. Another gulf to cross was the ‘deeper anguish’ of Arthur Hallam’s death, which had left Tennyson, as he said, ‘widowed,’ so that he ‘desired to die rather than to live’. But this, at least, was not a drawback to Emily. As a strengthening influence, she thought of herself as Hallam’s appointed successor. It seems a difficult concept, but it illustrates the depth, the purity, and the strange nature of Victorian emotional relationships.

Even Ann Thwaite, the most thoroughgoing of researchers, can’t tell exactly how it was that the crisis was resolved. They were married on 13 June 1850, at Shiplake-on-Thames. Tennyson said, in apparent surprise, that it was the nicest wedding he had ever been at.

Now Emily embarked on her profession, which was primarily a defensive campaign on many fronts. Tennyson had to be protected against distress of body and mind—against noise and disturbance, against the servant situation (which Georgie Burne-Jones, herself an expert campaigner, described as ‘a bloody feud or a hellish compact’), against visitors, sightseers, vexatious relatives, against a monstrous daily post (every amateur poet in the country sent their verses for his opinion), against contemptible hostile criticism and a writer’s own self-doubt and self-reproach. He seems to have managed up till then without her, largely by moving about. Indeed, even after his marriage, the Tennysons moved often, and for years Emily had two houses to run, Farringford at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight and Aldworth, near Haslemere, where they went in summer to avoid the holiday-makers. Ann Thwaite’s book is long, but her painstaking method is the only way to give an idea of Emily’s immensely troublesome, immensely rewarding daily life. Almost everything that could go wrong with the two houses did, including that traditional enemy, the drains. In 1856, for example, Emily was weeding potatoes, binding Alfred’s manuscripts, and planning a new dairy: she paid the bills and subscriptions, kept the accounts…found tenants…organized and supervised builders. She became deeply involved with the Farringford farm when they took it over in 1861. Emily would often consult Alfred—about the rent they should ask for the chalkpit, for instance—but he would say, ‘I must leave it in thy hands to manage.’

In 1865, Queen Emma of the Sandwich Islands arrives with her Hawaiian entourage. The children’s rooms are needed for the royal party, and they are crammed into the lodge, while Emily’s cousin and aunt, who are staying ‘indefinitely,’ are stowed away elsewhere. Later, Dr James Acworth arrives; his wife is a spiritualist medium and ‘in A’s study,’ Emily’s diary records, ‘a table heaves like the sea.’ In 1871, there is a full house at Aldworth, but Mrs Gladstone is told to come and bring as many of the family as possible. ‘We have room, both in house and heart.’ Some guests have to be encouraged, some consoled. Tennyson, although a generous host, is unpredictable. In 1859, Edward Lear, a favourite guest, is so rudely treated that he goes upstairs to pack; Emily soothes him and buys one of his drawings. Meantime, her two sons, Hallam and Lionel, are brought up from golden-haired darlings, encouraged to walk on the dinner table, to become unrebellious, affectionate, quite dull young men.

Thwaite gives them almost as much importance in her biography as they must have had in their own family. She is following, she says, Christopher Ricks’s advice to her—‘Parents are formed by their children as well as children formed by their parents.’ But did Emily ever change? Some personal difficulties she solved simply by letting them be—the poet’s dirty shirts, for example, his dark muttering or bellows of complaint after dinner, his skirmishes with pretty women visitors and his compulsion to wander. ‘I trust Saturday will indeed bring thee back, but do not come if there is anything for which thou wouldst wish to stay,’ she writes in 1859.

These indulgences irritated friends of long standing who saw Emily as a kind of saint, certainly much better than Alfred deserved. ‘Do not throw away your life,’ Jowett wrote to her. He thought ‘there was hardly enough of self in her to keep herself alive.’ Lear (half envious of the closeness of marriage, half repelled by it) wrote in his diary that ‘no other woman in all this world could live with [A. T.] for more than a month.’ They were mistaken, however, if they thought Tennyson was ungrateful. He knew very well that he was blessed, and would, he said, have worked as a stonebreaker to be allowed to marry her earlier. ‘If she were not one of the sweetest, justest natures in the world, I should be almost at my wits’ end.’ And the two of them faced together the death of two children—their first son, who was stillborn, and Lionel, who died at sea in 1885 on the passage home from India.

The usual image of Emily Tennyson is that of one more sickly Victorian woman, ruling from her sofa. (That, certainly, was how Virginia Woolf represented her in her play Freshwater.) From early childhood she had been considered a weak creature and as a married woman she was often in too much pain to walk, and yet, as Thwaite points out, when her sons were little she writes of climbing ladders, scrambling over rocks, and getting down the Alum Bay cliffs with her feet in eel-baskets. It was not until Hallam and Lionel were students that she had some kind of serious collapse. But nineteenth-century ailments defeat twentieth-century biographers. Reducing sufferers to a wreck, pain was accepted as a lifetime companion. Patience was prayed for, a cure was hardly expected. It’s a relief to know that Emily was a great believer in champagne, and brandy in her bedtime arrowroot.

After five years of research, Thwaite asks herself and the reader: was Emily Sellwood’s life (as Jowett put it) ‘effaced’? After she left school to become an angel in the house, she educated herself, like so many spirited Victorian daughters, by reading. (My own step-grandmother entered in her diary on her wedding-day: ‘Finished Antigone; Married Bishop.’)

Emily read Dante, Goethe, Schiller, science, and theology, as Thwaite says, ‘as though in preparation for eternity.’ When she was introduced to Queen Victoria, they talked ‘of Huxley, of the stars, of the millennium, of Jowett.’ Did she squander her intelligence, or worse still, did she wear herself out for nothing? Mrs Gilchrist (the widow of Blake’s first biographer) told William Rossetti that she believed that Emily did positive harm, when ‘watching him with anxious, affectionate solicitude, she surrounds him ever closer and closer with the sultry, perfumed atmosphere of luxury and homage in which his great soul—as indeed any soul would—droops and sickens’. Edward Fitzgerald, the sardonic friend, considered, in the 1870s, that Alfred would have done better with ‘an old Housekeeper like Molière’s’, or perhaps ‘a jolly woman who would have laughed and cried without any reason why’; Tennyson’s best things, he thought, had gone to press in 1842. What, then, is the value of a woman, and what is poetry worth, even one poem, say Maud, or ‘To the Rev. F. D. Maurice’? Thwaite, although she gently reproves Fitzgerald, doesn’t discuss these things. She has set her own limits, and she is not writing a book about Tennyson, but about Emily.

In fact, Tennyson understood, or at least comprehended his wife very well. He knew that she was motivated by love in its highest form of compassion, not only for himself but for every other human being. Motherless herself, she was conscious every hour of the day of ‘the forlorn ones.’ It wasn’t only that she dreamed on a large scale of old-age pensions for the poor, justice in Schleswig-Holstein, furnished rooms for single working women. Her instinct to rescue and console extended to the future and the past. Admiring Turner’s paintings, she added ‘How one wishes one might have done something to make his life happy.’ Simply to be unfortunate was a good enough claim on Emily.

Her faith, Tennyson wrote in the dedication to his last poems, was ‘clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven.’ Easy enough to treat this ironically or even satirically, but Ann Thwaite has done neither—she has gone right in among these people like a good, if inquisitive, neighbour who becomes a lifelong friend. She persuades us, or almost persuades us, that Emily mustn’t be thought of as a victim, since she believed her work was as important as it was possible to be. This doesn’t mean that she was satisfied with it. ‘I could have done more,’ she said on her deathbed.

Times Literary Supplement, 1996