Читать книгу Charlotte Mew: and Her Friends - Penelope Fitzgerald, Simon Callow - Страница 10

CHARLOTTE MEW’S two asylum poems are On the Asylum Road and Ken. These, like the others from which I have quoted, were written at a distance of time from the first experience. Like Hardy and Housman, she was a poet of delayed shock.

Both Ken and On the Asylum Road are impersonations, written through, but not in, the first person. Mad people are described by a sane onlooker, but ‘this I is not I’. In both poems the speaker, or spoken-through, is painfully indirect and breaks down at one point or another into a kind of dislocation, as though the subject of insanity could only be approached in that way. The guilt is obvious, but there is no solution for it, except refuge in the community’s opinion.

Ken is not about a case of dementia praecox, but an amiable harmless local idiot. He lives and always has lived at a place which sounds very like Carisbrooke – ‘the town is old, and very steep’, leading up to the mental hospital, the castle and the convent (which in Carisbrooke would be St Dominic’s). Ken means well, but is simply not like the rest of us, believing that all the children and all the deer in the park belong to him, and that a pile of broken feathers on the ground is really a living bird. He is hideous to look at, however,

If in His image God made men

Some other must have made poor Ken –

In time he becomes too much, not of a danger, but of a nuisance. Sometimes he stays in church too long, or points to the crucified Christ and says ‘Take it away’; then everyone is embarrassed. The only thing to do is to pretend not to notice, ‘You did not look at him as he sat there’ and finally to lock him up – and the speaker doesn’t suggest that the authorities are wrong about this. What else could they have done? But the poem ends

So, when they took

Ken to that place, I did not look

After he called and turned on me

His eyes. These I shall see –

Charlotte claimed that in this poem she had tried to ‘obscure the tragic side by tenderness of treatment’. Why she said this I cannot think. She must have known that she was emphasizing it.

On the Asylum Road is not localized, and might be anywhere where mental patients, at the end of the nineteenth century, were institutionalized and taken out for regular exercise. The first verse opens:

Theirs is the house whose windows – every pane –

Are made of darkly stained or clouded glass:

Sometimes you come upon them in the lane,

The saddest crowd that you will ever pass.

The horror of the darkly stained and clouded glass, the poem’s one insistent detail, works very strongly. Surgeries, Christian churches and mortuaries, as well as asylums, shut themselves off in this way, with glass which is a denial of what glass should be. Behind their dark glass, the mad own nothing. ‘Theirs is the house’ – but we know it isn’t, only it will be more convenient for us to pretend that it is. And ‘you’ (or in the next three verses ‘we’) have agreed that the best thing to do is smile encouragingly at them,

And think no shame to stop and crack a joke

With the incarnate wages of man’s sin.

The reader or listener is bound to ask what is happening here and why the inmates, the ‘brother shadows in the lane’, should (unless they are all syphilitics) be all classed together as ‘the incarnate wages of man’s sin’. This returns us to the wretched situation of 9 Gordon Street.

As ill-fortune would have it, the breakdown first of Henry, then of Freda, coincided with the years when the science or apparent science of eugenics first took the field, and became a favourite subject of newspaper articles. Francis Galton’s Natural Inheritance was published in 1889, and in 1894 he set up his research laboratory in University College. The belief of so many centuries that, given God’s grace and human patience, there was a hope that mad wits could be restored, was superseded, for the time being, by what looked like conclusive scientific evidence. Eugenics dealt in statistics, family studies and the tabulation of ‘morbid inheritance’, setting out to show that transmission of this inheritance led to the gradual degeneration of a whole society. The improvement of society, then, depended on genetic politics. If any member of your family was ‘different’, no matter in what way, you were morally bound not to reproduce. If you did so, you contributed to the nation’s decline and must expect ‘the incarnate wages of man’s sin’. In fact, the first editor to see Ken rejected it on the grounds that the magazine ‘believed in the segregation of the feeble-minded’. Charlotte and Anne, living within the orbit of London University, both of them great readers of weeklies and attenders of lectures, came to the conclusion that they must never have children, and so had no right to marry. This decision was not the same thing for the two of them. For Charlotte, whether or not she ever came to terms with her own sexuality, all passion was destructive. She had learned that already, and never had reason to change her mind. Anne, on the other hand, three years younger, was the most normal or even ‘the most human’ of the family. There was some self-imposed guilt in regard to the persuadable Anne, although they must have made the decision together.

But both the Mew girls loved children, Charlotte in particular. Their great capacity for happiness and disappointment appealed to her, so did their detachment from adult affairs and their concentration on the far greater reality of a game. She was delighted when she saw a small girl and boy wait unconcernedly for a coffin to be carried down the stairs and out of the door, and then turn back at once to playing shops. Of walking on stilts she wrote: ‘If you could go on doing it for ever, you need envy no-one, neither the angels nor the millionaires’, and of playing with water, ‘The horse-trough is always there to sail your hat in and trail your arms in, until your elder sister sneaks up from behind, and cops you out of it by the neck’. She suffered, only half-unwillingly, from empty arms. If she did not want to bear children, she would have liked to want to. ‘If there were fifty heavens God could not give us back the child who went or never came.’ Absorbed as she always was, from her Gower Street days, with the Brontës, she was haunted by the story of Charlotte Brontë’s dream as Mrs Gaskell tells it in her Life, a dream of holding a crying child, and knowing that nothing can save it.

There were the two daughters, then, in 9 Gordon Street, vowed to sterility, which would also mean devotion to each other. Three years’ difference in age steadily came to be less and less important. Charlotte and Anne saw that they had been born to make head against their difficulties together, with this difference, that there were some things Charlotte would never tell, or feel it right to tell, the docile Anne. Their mother’s role was established: she was a chronic invalid with no definable illness, a precious responsibility because so much had to be done for her. As to Fred, there is nothing to show what he felt about the fates of his youngest and oldest child, except his loss of interest in life. He ceased to do very much at all. There are no more records of him at the R.I.B.A., and his subscription to the newer Architectural Association lapsed altogether. In 1895 he wrote a dignified but pathetic letter to The Builder, pointing out that even the design for his Capital and Counties Bank at Bristol was now being attributed to another architect.

How did the Mews manage? In 1892 Anna Maria inherited a third of the estate from her grandfather, Thomas Cobham; this came to £2266 12s. 3d. Her mother died in this same year, again leaving her the correct third share, £1717. 2s. 10d., and an annuity of £50. Anna Maria had also come into two legacies, a little earlier, from an uncle and aunt. All these sums of money were administered for her by Walter Barnes Mew, the son of Fred’s sister Fanny, who was a solicitor with an office at 4 Harcourt Buildings, in the Temple. Fred evidently relied a good deal on Walter, and, writing to him as ‘your affectionate uncle’, was glad to leave matters in his capable hands. ‘Anything that appears foggy to me will doubtless be clear enough to your legal eye,’ he added, sounding a good deal older than his sixty years. Walter, with the approval of the trustees, invested the total sum in an annuity for Anna Maria, which would bring her in £300. It was a reasonable sum at a time when you could cling to respectability, even gentility, on £80 a year. The annuity, of course, would die with her, but Walter must have calculated that Charlotte and Anne, his two pretty cousins, would find husbands soon enough.

Or they might even earn their own livings. Anne, since she left the Gower Street School, had been enrolled at the Royal Female School of Art at 43 Queen Square, within easy walking distance of Gordon Street. The course offered two five-month terms at fifteen guineas a year, three times as much as the South Kensington Schools, which concentrated on design training for industry. The Female School, on the other hand, had in mind, from its first beginnings in the 1840s, the daughters of professional men ‘unexpectedly compelled to earn a living’, and at first the students had only been accepted at discretion, if they could show (preferably with a certificate from a clergyman) that they were genuine ‘needy gentlewomen’ who would be obliged to maintain themselves. Anne specialized in bird and flower painting. She was happy to do only that, hoping one day for an exhibition of her own, but if need arose she would be qualified to teach or to execute paid commissions, without ever ceasing to be a lady. Anna Maria need have no alarm on that score. Her younger daughter would still have the prestige of an amateur.

What about Charlotte, who had learned only what she chose to, but always did it well? She was, for instance, very good at embroidery, and she could have got an excellent training at the Royal School of Art Needlework, established with its workrooms in Kensington, or, if that was too far to go, there was a School of Mediaeval Embroidery, run by the sisterhood of St Katherine in Queen Square to supply church furnishings. She could then have worked at home, and sold discreetly, perhaps through the Association for the Sale of Work of Ladies of Limited Means. She could, though this would have been more difficult to conceal from the neighbours, have given piano lessons. From Miss Harrison she had heard time and again a reading of Carlyle’s ‘Everlasting No’ from Sartor Resartus. The ‘No’ is the certainty of death and the loss of faith which make life meaningless, followed by the answering Everlasting Yea, that in spite of this, man must work at what he is fit for. ‘Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fragment of a product, produce it, in God’s name!’ But the truth was that Charlotte, in spite of Carlyle, hated steady work. It has to be admitted that she never applied herself systematically to anything.

It might be thought, however, that as a changeling and enfant terrible, only just grown up, she would have wanted independence at all costs. Here we come to the irreconcilables in Charlotte Mew. One side of her treated the other cruelly. She was secretly, and sometimes openly, impelled to let rip, to shock the shockable, and to turn her back on the lot of them.

Please you, excuse me, good five o’clock people,

I’ve lost my last hatful of words

and yet she clung as desperately as Anna Maria herself to dear respectability. She never left home for long, never became – for example – a suffragette or even a suffragist, never made any attempt to claim political or sexual freedom or defend herself either against society or her own nature. On the contrary, with fierce self-suppression she inherited the fate of the world’s minorities and suffered as an outsider, an outsider, that is, even to herself. She was determined to remain Miss Lotti – a lady, even if she made rather an odd one. There is pathos in this clinging to gentility by a free spirit, who seemed born to have nothing to do with it. But her home promised normality – its very dullness did that – and normality implies peace. As a five o’clock person, out of the shadow of the madhouse, a good daughter, devoted to her mother, she could treat the savage who threatened her from within as a stranger. To use her own image, she could stay as ‘a blade of grass which dare not grow too high lest the world should snap it’.

However, she was also a writer. At the beginning of the 1890s Elizabeth Goodman was still in charge of the household, since ‘no-one dared to speak to her of rest’, but she now no longer swept Charlotte’s manuscripts into her dustpan. Alone in her room Charlotte sat down, partly to justify her friends’ expectations – that always meant a great deal to her – partly to show herself what she could do, partly to earn money. Without money free will means very little. Though Charlotte never wanted to get rid of her responsibilities, she preferred not to be answerable to anyone. She needed, in fact, not independence but freedom.

There was a business-like side to Charlotte. She knew, at least, how to set out on a writer’s career. Her manuscripts went out to a lady typewriter – they were still called that – who, herself, was a distressed gentlewoman. They came back neatly bound in brown paper, were lightly corrected in pencil and sent off with the stamps for return postage stuck to the front cover. As to where they should go, there was a wide choice in the nineties, the golden age of the English periodical. A hopeful writer, a beginner poised on the verge, must have been bewildered simply by the number of new and older publications. Although Answers and Tit-Bits had been started, with enormous success, to provide something lighter in the way of weeklies, they existed side by side with the older heavies, The Athenaeum, The Sphere, The Academy, The Spectator, The Saturday Review and a host of others, always increasing, literary or political or both, and joined every month by the closely printed ranks of magazines, led by Blackwood’s, The Strand and the Pall Mall. These last specialized in fiction, and could count on the best-known names as contributors – Hardy, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Conan Doyle, Conrad, Henry James, all of them valued in those days largely as spinners of yarns. The best seller had not yet parted company with literature. The yarns, whether they came from hacks or writers of genius, were set among feature and travel articles and pages of ‘little-known facts’ which linked the magazines with the earlier self-educational journals. The readers were loyal and persevering, ready to learn what the writers insisted on telling them.

In 1891, for example, when The Strand first appeared, George Newnes ‘respectfully placed his first number in the hands of the public’, hoping, as he said, to justify its survival in spite of the ‘vast number of existing monthlies’. Newnes opened with an absurd romance by Grant Allen in which the heroine faints on a railway line and the hero (called Ughtred Carnegie) has to decide whether to save her and derail the oncoming express, or to leave her to her fate. Next there are ‘portraits of celebrities’ (Tennyson, Swinburne, Rider Haggard, Sir John Lubbock, representing three parts of literature to one of science), notes from a sermon by Cardinal Manning, and a feature on the Metropolitan Fire Brigade, which opens:

Fire! Fire! This startling cry aroused me one night as I was putting the finishing touches to some literary work. Rushing pen in hand to the window I could just perceive a dull red glare in the northern sky.

This leads to yet another rescue, when at the scene of the fire ‘a female form appears at an upper window’. If it had not been a female form, or failing that, a child, it would have not been interesting enough for The Strand.

Charlotte’s first venture, The Minnow Fishers, was in this ‘curious personal experience’ category, much in demand from editors and readers. It was based on a real incident during one of her walks along the canal towpath to Maida Vale, on the way to Kensal Green, where her grandfather Henry Kendall lay buried. The Minnow Fishers are small boys on this towpath, intent on their lines and hooks. They don’t apparently notice that an even smaller child is struggling in the water ‘or if they had it didn’t detract them from the business in hand’. For this detachment Charlotte feels a kind of admiration. The drowning child is dragged out by a passer-by, and one of the boys has to admit to being the elder brother of this ‘miserable object blinking palely out again at life, laboriously restored to the damp dusk, the cheerless outlook of the dingy stretches of the bank, the stagnant water and the impassive friends’. The brother is obliged to take the victim home, but gives him ‘a vindictive cuff, which met with no response. The two remaining minnow fishers sat serenely on.’

In its sympathetic view of children hard, or hardened, as nails, this story makes a good introduction to Charlotte Mew’s London. One detail, the bloated face of the rescued infant, ‘a painful spectacle, suggestive of a crimson airball, a gruesome penny toy’, shows that she is describing something actually seen. What is surprising is how little, after all, she seems to have learned from Miss Harrison’s English lessons. Charlotte always had trouble with grammar and punctuation, but, apart from that, the presentation of the story is laborious in the extreme, opening with

It was an after-dinner patter; someone had been generalizing on the elevating influence of sports, of angling in particular: ‘And thereby,’ interposed my friend, John Hilton, ‘hangs a tale; it was when we lived near Maida Vale of Melancholy Memory: I was walking home one horribly damp afternoon by way of the canal’ …

and so on. This very short story hardly needs the ‘after-dinner patter’ or John Hilton either: he is simply a device, or rather a gallant attempt to adapt to the fiction market. And he was not of much use to Charlotte, who was unable to place The Minnow Fishers, although she put it by and sent it later to The Outlook. She would have to try a different tack.

The epigraph to The Minnow Fishers is from Richard Jefferies, ‘to be calm without mental fear is the ideal of nature’. Charlotte, from her school days, kept lists of quotations from favourite authors, copying out sentences that seemed to her helpful and true. In 1889 she had been reading Jefferies’ Field and Hedgerow, his last essays, a book published after his death. ‘It set my own heart beating,’ she wrote, ‘for I felt I discovered in it an undreamed-of universe.’ Jefferies’ large claims to have learned ‘the spirit of earth and sea and the soul of the sun’ answered to her own intimations, feelings beyond words that had come to her as a child on the Island.

They come at evening with the home-flying rooks and the scent of hay,

Over the fields. They come in spring.

Field and Hedgerow, like her own vision of nature’s peace, was a relief from what she called ‘pavement dreams – those thoughts that come sometimes in cities, of the weary length or terrible brevity of life’. The trouble was, and she knew this very well herself, that she was an incurable Londoner. The intimations would not hold. She wanted company, even when she was declaring she didn’t, she loved hurrying from one appointment to another, and feeling all round her the pressure of a million unknown lives. Jefferies himself, in Amaryllis at the Fair, has a sudden glimpse of the ‘terrible, beautiful thickness of people’ in the London streets, ‘so many, like the opulence of Nature itself’. How well she understood this Charlotte showed in one of her last poems, The Shade-Catchers.

At about this time Anne brought a new friend home to Gordon Street, a student from the Female School of Art, Elsie Millard. Elsie’s father was elocution master at the City of London School; her elder sister, Evelyn, was on the stage. Evelyn had been rigorously trained in her father’s personal system, based on a selection of speeches from Shakespeare arranged alphabetically to illustrate the whole range of emotions from Ambition and Anger to Unimpassioned speech, Violence, Wistfulness and Zeal. In 1891 she was appearing at the Grand Theatre, Islington, in Joseph’s Sweetheart, but her speciality was in ‘perfect lady’ parts and her great successes were to be in Pinero’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray and as Princess Flavia in The Prisoner of Zenda. Elsie, who preferred landscape painting, occasionally made sketching trips to the West of Ireland. The Millards were eminently respectable – they lived in Kensington, and were strict Catholics – but they did bring Charlotte, for the first time, into the fringe of the theatrical and studio world.

A break with the past came in 1893, with the death of Elizabeth Goodman. At the age of sixty-nine she contracted blood poisoning, as the result of running a needle into her hand. She had always wanted to die in harness, and she did. But after it was all over a strange group of Goodman relatives and in-laws, whom no-one had ever heard of before, turned up to take away her few belongings in a cab. They insisted on arranging the funeral, ‘not without some bitterness’. Charlotte felt they made the house smell. ‘Their moral and physical odour seemed to cling about it long after they had left it.’ An interesting point is her attitude to Elizabeth Goodman’s ‘plausible greasy sister-in-law, who was alleged to be an artist’s model and when not sitting to someone or other was said to be nursing an invalid gentleman at Boulogne or Worthing or Ostend.’ In short, she was a kept woman, ‘always taking expensive medicines and borrowing railway fares’, and this is what Charlotte felt about such women when she actually met them. In contrast, she went on romanticizing the Magdalens and pale harlots of the pavements and street lights, creatures of the abyss, seen only in passing. In this matter Charlotte Mew was truly a child of the 1890s.

Nothing of Elizabeth Goodman’s was left at 9 Gordon Street – not even her workbox, or her Queen Victoria Jubilee tea-pot. How deeply and how confusedly Charlotte felt the loss can be seen from a curious fantasy which she wrote, A Wedding Day. The bride, in the excitement of her marriage, forgets the old woman who has looked after her since she was a child. The old woman, tired out by a lifetime’s work, sits in her spotless cap and apron, with her Bible and workbox on her knee, waiting in vain for the expected visit. During the bridal night itself, when for the lovers ‘the present is eternity’, the old woman dies. As a corpse she is still sitting stiffly the next morning in her chair, ‘alone and smiling’. She has remained on duty.

Charlotte was twenty-five. The Minnow Fishers had not been accepted so far, nor had A Wedding Day. In 1894, in common with most of London’s hopeful writers, she saw the preliminary announcement of yet another magazine, this time a new quarterly. ‘In many ways its contributors will employ a freer hand than the limitations of the old-fashioned periodical can permit. It will publish no serials; but its complete stories will sometimes run to a considerable length in themselves.’ The notice was printed on bright yellow paper, with a bizarre illustration by Aubrey Beardsley. ‘And while The Yellow Book will seek always to preserve a delicate, decorous and reticent mien and conduct, it will at the same time have the courage of its modernness, and not tremble at the frown of Mrs Grundy.’ Although John Lane, the publisher, was every bit as commercially-minded as Newnes, the élitist tone of all this contrasted boldly with The Strand, which had been ‘respectfully placed’ in the hands of the public. The Yellow Book also promised to be important, charming, daring and distinguished, and the editor was prepared to consider contributions.