by Anna Vaught
Let me say, Violet (and Bertha places a kind hand on her friend’s arm) that places beyond hope I had seen when I began my work and to build the home at Neu-Isenburg, for abandoned young women, their babies and children. I understand. And I knew madness and fear. As for Bedlam? I had heard of that and know it to be an old place, shifting its site for centuries, its words creeping into the English language, even.
And I know of locks and bare boards and filth. Of restraints and a tiny patch of blue sky, adds Blanche. Yes, even though I had performance privileges above others, I was still housed in a cell.
Then I: Oh Violet. The camisole de force: bundled into the straitjacket at my own brother’s behest. In solitary confinement in France. In my white jacket when I railed. I shiver at the memory. Violet, do not be ashamed. Prisons are plural and various; I mean they come in many forms and your suffering is not disallowed because you had privilege.
Violet’s tears now like summer tempests.
It is enough, Violet. We need to go somewhere else, I think, if you will allow it.
And I cradle my friend. Violet is a fragile old woman and though her spirits in this journey with the others appear vigorous, she could break, couldn’t she? There is little time, I fear. Where next, my friend?
Open air, she says.
We clutch hands. I remember that I was laughing about how we crazies looked like Macbeth’s witches. I cried aloud, remembering the play: Hecate the ward nurse will be along to chastise the saucy beldams!
Followed by King James I brandishing his copy of Daemonologie, no doubt! cries Violet, so cheered by love. Was King George III the only mad? Violet tells me that I should look up the stories of the monster of Glamis Castle; the rumours of a royal boy locked up for madness and deformity; of the cousins of our recent queen, hidden from sight, tagged and plonked in paupers’ graves. Bad, bad Queenie and her mother. Lucia, says she: Learn all you can and do not forget. And I tell her that I will try. Families can be so cruel, through shame.
Now, though. What adventure!
Violet whispers where it will be next. France. 1887. Where we alight, we would be only one hundred and twenty miles away from the stinking slums and the lady coming out now, mewling and scrawny babe in arms. From the darkness that rests, dilating and dilating since the sun went down last night and so, into the broad rays of sunlight and the purer air. And yet, even here sadness is oppressive. But we can change that. Do you feel the tang of the sea air, girls? says she, and I respond, Violet, we do and I believe that you can change things.
She laughs: Fly, beautiful passerines!
And so we do, and it is glorious.
11
There are people who, from a lack of experience or out of apathy, turn mockingly or pityingly away from such phenomena as from a ‘sickness of the people’, with a sense of their own health. These poor people naturally do not have any sense of how deathly and ghost-like this very ‘health’ of theirs sounds, when the glowing life of the Dionysian throng roars past them.
Nietzsche, from The Birth of Tragedy.
France. Summer, 1887. Holidays en masse for the Gibson cohort. And here, in Normandy, a place Violet knew so well.
Look, says Violet: Boulogne-Sur-Mer. I had travelled with my parents and siblings. At home, I was hemmed in, like Cassandra, with my dutiful governess, but I do see that I got to go to places of such beauty. I am grateful. Venice and The Lakes when I was ten. Oh, but. And here. We aren’t far from the estate my father took for the summer months. I believe it is 1887 and I am twelve. The girl at the water’s edge. It is me. I am working out a way to get nearer to my father, surrounded as he is by all my siblings. Mother is somewhat separate. You see, she was not very strong and she had had many children. Even with all the help, I wonder if there were not enough space to accommodate us all, least of all me, the spark-eyed child that tantrummed and howled. Will you watch with me?
And of course we will. I tell her that on the French coast I discovered an ease and liberty I had only dreamed of before. I felt a new and glowing life within me. Seeing the coast now strikes a chord, strikes up a cadence, both painful and glorious. When I danced with my troupe, Les Six, my teacher, who was like a mother to me, Margaret Morris, would talk to us about how dance was for everyone. We could not all dance in the same way, but we could all dance. Dance gave you strength and health. It healed the enervated and confused new mother; it helped the child grow strong and lithe. There was an admirable strength in her, Margaret, a potency that you couldn’t take your eyes off. She radiated health and hoped the same of us, and would have us dance in the open air and, for joy, in the sea. I thought she was a goddess. Margaret was the granddaughter of William Morris, you know. She believed in beauty but also in usefulness. In purpose.
We would come and stay—no, not on this coast. I am sorry, it feels so long ago—it was at Juan-les-Pins; it is in the Alpes-Maritimes, on the Côte-d’Azur. Margaret took us there for summer school and we lived right on the sea. Yes: the Hôtel Beau Site. Sometimes we walked (or did I dream this?) in the deep forests of the Cap d’Antibes peninsula with their shadowy coolness, all in contrast with the violet grapevines and the luscious gardens where they grew peaches. I can see it. And, oh: it is on my palate too! Delicious. And in the bathing hut there was lemonade and I remember the rough rasp of towels on my legs, the tug of my bathing suit and the stretches to warm up that made me shine my breastbone up to the sky, feet in the water, and my heart was soaked with joy.
And I want to feel that now. I want to run and dance on this beach I tell them. And, as Bertha and Blanche tell me that they have never seen the sea, my pulse quickens.
Then—and I think that Violet is radiant as she exclaims this—oh darling girl, do it. Do it now. Your clothes will look strange and the people on the beach will stare at you, but then you have always felt strange, so it should not matter. Go to the water’s edge and begin to dance. You’ve been dormant too long.
I will, Violet. I will.
And so Violet’s Lucy Light advances. Not here the soft southern light, but the colder one of low skies and an almost-English coast. Dover is not far away, and in Boulogne-Sur-Mer it rains more than it does on the South Coast of England. From Dover, St Andrew’s is not such a stretch: a migrating swallow, on its journey to warmer climes, would travel further in a day. In years to come, Violet, in an imbroglio, neurasthenic and dangerous, would be transported from Boulogne to Folkestone; from there she would travel to Victoria, sweep near the family house in Grosvenor Square and be driven on for the two statements of lunacy at Harley Street, before the train from Euston and, finally, before she realises she is captive. She will never see abroad or home again and the walls of the country-manor-like hospital enclose her forever. But then again, the walls of the imagination are flexible. Violet knows what your imagination can do; the other women have grasped it because they had to, for survival, for their creative strains to be intact when they were presumed hysterics, thought insane. Imagination is vast and protean. If you know nothing else from these pages, know that.
But what more of Miss Lucia Joyce, in her younger years? This is my text, so a little story, not at first apposite, emerges. It’s just a little story, but one that remains important to me. Once, travelling to Waterloo, the American author Thomas Wolfe met us. Daddy and the barnacle and, I think, Giorgio, too. It was said (I was eavesdropping later on a Joyce conversation) that the tall handsome man—I’d heard some say he was a genius—was charmed by me immediately; thought me pretty, a little American flapper, perhaps. Oh, I saw him, all right: square jawed and dark eyed; heard the mountain voice and was transported, though I did not know to where. Sensed that here was a man who knew about the imagination. I was right! He went out of its country and he went into its country and the two geographies were intertwined. In 1929 he published Look Homeward Angel and I began to read it. The second part of its title is A Story of a Buried Life. People forget that
bit, but it’s a trope all too familiar to me. Or to the others. Being buried alive. A Story of a Buried Life.
Wolfe was seven years older than me. A coincidence; a might-have-been: a profound understanding of walls. He wrote, of the young Eugene Gant, thought to be himself, that the prison walls of self had closed entirely round him; he was walled completely by the esymplastic power of his imagination—he had learned by now to project mechanically, before the world, an acceptable counterfeit of himself which would protect him from intrusion.
Esemplastic I murmur now, still audible to the others, as I feel the swell of the water around my ankles, my calves; the water begins to make me feel alive, as if awaking from long sleep. Yes, I did begin to read the book and was struck with this bit. And with the tall handsome man on the bus to Waterloo. I wonder, what if...
What dear? calls Violet: Are you thinking of Thomas Wolfe—oh I know; I read; I see— because he misspelt it, you know: esemplastic. It’s from Biographia Literaria, and Coleridge jolly well made it up. You know how it is when on opiates. Even so, it is absolutely true for our time that we use the imagination to shape our world. I’m not going all Madame Blavatsky on you! (And yes, I do know she’s rambling, the old crack-brain, but I’m a fine one to talk!) You remember what she spouted about this sort of thing? But just out of interest, girls, that fellow Coleridge also coined the word psychosomatic. We won’t all have heard of that, for I don’t think it was quite in the medical argot of your days, Blanche, Bertha. But, oh God, I had a heart attack and they wouldn’t believe me and they said that was psychosomatic. Same reason my teeth came out, maybe. People struggle to read the testament of lunatics.
Then let’s make sure they listen! laughs Blanche: They’ve got some of the best stories, too, the crazy women. The life of the asylum is rich in ways they can’t imagine!
Keep up, keep up.
There’s so much to cover.
Now I, Lucia, walk out just a little further, into the sea. No, no, not to drown but to enjoy. And really, nothing else exists as Lucia walks, alone, into the water, with her imagination properly plastic and not dulled by the sedentary life of the non-compos. Her skirt edge is wet but she doesn’t feel it, in this moment. She stretches and elongates her limbs, imagining she is with her friends and co-dancers, imagining that this rhythmic movement is the foundation of a new health.
Margaret Morris, she whom I so loved, taught babies to improvise to music, she saw wriggling toddlers feeling, not copying, as we should teach our smallest to do. Later—later, that is, in my own time—I would, myself, become a Margaret Morris teacher in Paris. Dancing was all; then it was stopped up. But what of now, for I cannot grieve forever? But in this moment, the many Gibson siblings play and dig on the beach. They throw a ball, bicker, and calm.
Look at that lady! say the Gibson children, in their cohort, on the sand.
Lady Gibson (Mother) has her head in a book and is sitting, anyway, just a little away from them. They know not to shout in case she gets one of her heads. Christian Science has taught her to parcel out her energies and rest with folded hands whenever she can, though much good it seems to have done her. Lord Gibson is dozing. It’s a fine day.
She’s dancing!
And I want to exclaim, I can’t help it. I am alive! Oh God, I am alive!
Actually, I do exclaim it. I yell it out. What a revelation!
I shout: I am, I am, oh God, I am alive! I wallow in its vociferation. Oh!
The children quietly approach me, funny lady bellowing into the ebb. As I sway and dance, as I make shapes as if I were young again, they copy me: they think I am terribly strange, yet interesting. What is your name? asks Harry, one day to be a champion tobogganer and to die of tuberculosis, wretched, cursing, at thirty-five.
Yes, you are so funny! A funny lady! chimes Victor. While still a young man, he will be found, in 1922, in an armchair in a Surrey pub. Death unexplained. The acute pain of this, of loss, would change Violet. As she watches, from further up the beach now, she is happy just to see them run and laugh. Before they are disassembled.
And all the children dance in the water. Young Violet does not come. Her father stirs and she understands that she has him all to herself. He sees the children playing and does not compute that the stranger is with them, with his large brood; and somewhere not far away is she who will shoot the leader of Italy and be put away for shame. I want so badly to tell him that, at her end, and when she is dead, without him, she won’t be alone and her story will be told. But he needs this time with little Violet, or rather she with him. And he doesn’t see me: there are plenty of people in the shallow water, after all. He does not sense the paradox, the wide expanse of time that separates him from Lucy Light or from the old woman looking across at him, her once beloved. But in front of him now sits small his intransigent, truculent daughter. Violet. And she holds one of his hands while he smooths her hair with the other. She doesn’t have to keep up the French to try and still him, make him hers while he practises. Her French is better than his because, of course, she’s a rapid learner. She has him, just for a little while, all to herself and, even in that desolate and cold place, in the heart of the old woman, the place which more love would have warmed, there is thawing and comfort.
And the child smiles. Looks across. Does she know?
And the children in the surf smile with the funny lady who says: My name? Oh we might meet again, some day. And then you’ll know my name. I am Lucia. Lucia what? Lucia Anna Joyce. They’ll always remember that, but they won’t mention it to their parents because children keep secrets, if they want.
I return to my friends. I am becalmed; happy. I’ve had a good throaty shout, too.
The children stay in the water a while, then return to their parents and Violet.
That was fun. You missed it, Violet.
Oh, I don’t think so, says the sliding, peripheral glance of the child, whose imagination is, indeed, esemplastic, even now. She cherished those stolen moments with her father.
What would you choose now, Bertha? I mean, to do right now? I ask.
This. A story. Telling a story and telling our story. None of us came to be mothers. I don’t know how I know that. I am saying it as fact, not as loss. And of course, for me, there were the many children and young people I cared for at Neu-Isenburg in the home we built; the strides I made with them or on their behalf. I held so many babies, of women cast out, or young, so young; sometimes not parented themselves, so how would they know what they should do to mother? So we tried to show them. Sometimes, to soothe, I told stories. Sometimes, from Hans Christian Andersen: The Nightingale I loved especially. (And I tell her that Violet and I love it too.) But stories came often from my head. And in time, I wrote them down.
For me, says Bertha, the gift was reading and sharing it. And from that came my writing. Writing my prayers, Gebete, and the stories for children I so enjoyed. Look: The Junk Shop and Other Stories. I have it with me at all times, not because I see myself as a great writer, but because you never know when a story could be needed.
I was never read to, says Blanche: My family ill or desperate. Oh, and legion. I don’t know, still, how much they were able to read. And I can’t read much, or write. In this, I am child, but I’m a quick learner. And of course, in the Salpêtrière, telling one another stories was how we managed.
Tell me a story of childhood, Bertha, I say. I feel that I am sobbing now. It is right; just fine to cry in such volume and no-one need be uncomfortable.
Well, says Violet, if she cries too much at her hospital, there is always the risk that things will escalate; that she will be on suicide watch and so she will be escorted at all times. Or confined further in case of unpleasantness. If this happened at St Andrew’s, we wouldn’t be able to write things down, notes and stories, or to go outside to feed the passerines. Here, crying is unbridled. Because the past—or the future for you, Bertha and Bl
anche—is a different... campagne.
Bertha opens her story book, The Junk Shop and Other Stories, and begins:
The door of the junk shop stands open when the bell penetrates the darkness inside, along with rays of the sun…
The story continues at length; our birds sit: time is immaterial because inside this shop are wonders of the imagination and things that come to life when the bell rings and the rays of the sun warm its contents. Dusty old stuffs become playthings or decorations of great beauty, illuminating homes, worlds. That is how it went. That is how it is.
Bertha asks Blanche: What of you now, as we are here? What would you like?
Ah. My pleasure has been in listening to and watching you. In being a happy spectator. Because I was always the spectacle and I’m tired of all that. Show’s over now.
And I think, Yes almost. The show is almost over for Violet, in these days I know will be her last. But for me, is it only just beginning? Would I shame if I made my—our—book and went boldly into the outside world? Could I really do it?
Why yes, Lucy Light, you could and there would be no shame, only pride, answers Violet. Odd, then, that I’d not spoken aloud.
