Two-Way Mirror
Page 24
I cannot well say nothing of my constant thoughts about you, most pleasant remembrances of you, earnest desires for you—yet I will […] write freely what, I dare say, I said niggardly enough—my real love for you—better love than I had supposed I was fit for: […] There! And now, let that lie, till we meet again.
Even though Domett didn’t respond for a year and a half, Robert continued to send long, affectionate missives whose intensity only abated after he met Elizabeth. Which would matter little by 1848; except that another figure from Robert’s bachelor days is about to enter Elizabeth’s life and, for a while, ‘turn her evenings to ashes’.
The Fano poem may well be triggered by post-viral depression. Robert hasn’t completely shaken off a summer flu even as the couple complete their three-week trip by visiting Rimini and Ravenna, where they spend a pre-dawn hour at Dante’s tomb. The tour gives Elizabeth yet more Italy to fall in love with: ‘the exquisite, almost visionary scenery of the Apennines, the wonderful variety of shape & colour, the sudden transitions, & vital individuality of those mountains .. the chesnut forests dropping by their own weight into the deep ravines’. Flush enjoys himself too, especially in towns: ‘He looked east, he looked west .. you would conclude that he was taking notes or preparing them. His eagerness to get into the carriage first used to amuse the Italians.’ But Robert remains under par. Back home he develops a severe throat infection. For three weeks he has a high fever and, as pain keeps him awake and it becomes increasingly painful to take anything by mouth, gradually loses strength; yet he refuses to see a doctor. So it seems like sheer luck when, in the third week of September, a literary bachelor friend, the Revd Fr Francis Sylvester Mahony, calls unexpectedly. Seeing the state Robert’s in, Mahony forces him to drink an improvised concoction of egg yolks and heated port wine, that, in helping the feverish patient to sleep, is key to his cure.
At least, this is the story according to Mahony, who styles himself ‘Father Prout’ and encourages the belief that ‘he is one of [the Jesuit order’s] most active members & in constant employment, .. holding high trusts’, but who has actually been working as the Rome correspondent of the Daily News since 1846. In fact, Elizabeth records of Mahony’s famous hot drink merely that her husband ‘was the better’ for sleeping after it. Robert’s actual recovery from what his symptoms suggest is a quinsy comes when this abscess behind the tonsils bursts: ‘Relief came at last by the breaking of something in the throat, & by nearly a wineglass full of matter coming up.’ No matter. The talkative and energetic, but also vulgar and cynical, ‘Revd Father’ now invites himself to the Palazzo Guidi drawing room to smoke ‘everyday […], sometimes twice a day, & generally for two hours at a time […] walking up & down in the room & performing an alternation of expectorations now in the fireplace & now on […] our new carpet.’
This would be revolting at the best of times. But Robert is breathing the smoke through an infected throat, and a pregnant Elizabeth is nauseated, ‘catastrophe as nearly occurring as possible […] through an ascend
he plants himself close to my sofa, smokes at leisure two or three cigars, takes one of our Raffael-basins for a spitting convenience, & last night, not for the first time by any means, both Robert & I were fairly sick. […] When he had gone .. between ten & eleve
By 22 November, after two months of this performance every night but one, Mahony’s ‘disagreeableness is beginning to pass his agreebleness’. He calls Elizabeth ‘a regular child .. a bambino, my dear’. She is his ‘ “Little dear” in his first visit, and “Dearest” on the second, so that, as I told Robert, I fully expected to be kissed on the third—[…] I shant be asked […] whether I allow it or not—’. He hijacks the intimate nickname ‘Ba’, and mocks his hostess for having shyly pulled down her travelling veil when he intercepted the couple as they first arrived in Livorno. The evenings are spent in conversation primarily between the men, and there’s an undercurrent of misogyny to this dismissal of someone who is increasingly being seen as Britain’s greatest living woman poet; a sense, almost, of trying to recruit Robert back to a bachelor cause.
Mahony is just two years older than Elizabeth, and lives precisely the kind of literary life from which gender excludes her. Since the 1830s he’s been a prolific columnist, for example in Fraser’s Magazine. There he hobnobbed with le tout monde, including surviving second-generation Romantics Thomas Jefferson Hogg and Thomas Medwin. Another ‘Fraserian’ is Robert’s mentor William Makepeace Thackeray, whose masterpiece Vanity Fair, ‘Very clever, very effective, but cruel to human nature–’, has just recently finished lengthy serialisation in Punch. It will be apparent to everyone at Palazzo Guidi that, if there is a ‘Vanity Fair’ of the literary world, Mahony belongs there.
But does Robert belong there too? Elizabeth’s writing life has been disproportionately inner, as her occasional sententiousness reveals. She’s sheltered and high-minded; in fact this is just what she represents to Robert. ‘I want to be a Poet […] dear angel of my life’, as he wrote to her towards the culmination of their courtship, when he was finding ‘the dullness […] mortal’ at the kind of literary soirée he’d hitherto enjoyed. ‘I am far from my ordinary self […] oh, to be with you, Ba’. Onlookers, Mahony possibly among them, will assume this difference is a fault line in the marriage. But the couple aren’t young ingénues. They understand each other. And perhaps they recognise how each can help the other experience a fuller writing life, as Elizabeth, formerly so shy, now falls easily into literary socialising – ‘Society by flashes is the brightest way of having it’ – and Robert picks up her poetic techniques.
Still, Mahony’s arrival at Palazzo Guidi is a signal of some kind. It’s the fourth in what would be a quite remarkable chain of coincidences:
[Robert] laughed a little as he told me that in crossing Poland Street with our passport, just at that crisis, he met .. Father Prout—[…] I said, ‘Curious’, & the conversation changed. On our landing at Leghorn, at nine oclock in the morning, our boat which was rowed from the steamer to the shore, passed close to a bare jutting piece of rock on which stood a man wrapt in a cloak, he also having just landed […] Robert cried out, ‘Good Heavens, there he is again! there’s Father Prout!’ We went to the inn & breakfasted, & after breakfast the reverend Lion came into the room.
This already seems almost too good to be true. Then there’s a third ‘coincidence’, the day last November when Robert, full of flirtatious high spirits, came bounding back to the Via delle Belle Donne to announce that Mahony had bumped into him in the street, taken him for coffee, and kissed him full on the mouth. Now the journalist-priest has turned up at Palazzo Guidi, where someone – who? – has given him the address.
‘Mrs Jameson says he is the bitterest of clever talkers, and that Robert is nearly the only man in the world whom he speaks well of—.’ Perhaps being based in Rome means that Mahony is starved of English literary talk. But at this point we need to cock an ear to Mary Russell Mitford’s gossip. In 1847 she thought back eleven years to 1836 and that opening-night party for Noon Talfourd’s Ion. There, as she confided to the travel writer Charles Boner, she met ‘Mr Browning’:
& remember thinking how exactly he resembled a girl drest in boy’s clothes—[…] he had long ringlets & no neckcloth—& […] seemed to me about the height & size of a boy of twelve years old—Femmelette—is a word made for him. A strange sort of person to carry such a woman as Elizabeth Barrett off her feet.
Every generation misreads the dandyism of the next, and as an ambitious young poet Robert tried hard to establish a Bohemian persona. But Mitford is making a stronger claim than this, ‘in malice’ as she admits. By the 1880s femmelette will be pre-eminently used – in French, which she speaks fluently – to indicate sexuality, rather like English twentieth-century uses of ‘effeminate’. But in the first half of the nineteenth century desire of all kinds is much less socially
acknowledged than it will become, and ‘sodomy’ in particular is illegal – which is why the 1816 legal separation case divulging Byron’s proclivities led to his exile. Prohibition creates an innocence around same-sex friendships that allows them to include behaviour, like declarations of love and bed-sharing, that could be anachronistically misinterpreted as sexual. For exactly the same reason, it also allows same-sex love to be acted out in plain sight despite social conventions – and whether or not both participants realise it.
So might Robert the femmelette ever have experimented with bisexuality, or attracted crushes? The possibility will traditionally be ignored: after all, the Brownings share a passion that’s clearly sexual as well as romantic. But bisexuality isn’t disproved by a great love affair with an individual of either sex. Also, Robert is long held to have condemned Shakespeare’s bisexuality. In fact his much-cited debate is with William Wordsworth not Shakespeare, concerns literary biography not sexuality, and goes like this. In 1827 Wordsworth’s eponymous ‘Scorn not the Sonnet’ called Shakespeare’s notoriously sexually ambiguous sonnets a ‘key’ with which he ‘unlocked his heart’. But this is a conventional characterisation of sonnet form itself, not of any particular sexuality, and nearly four decades later Robert’s 1876 poem ‘House’ will retort that it’s wrong to read any poetry as confessional:
’Tis the fall of its frontage permits you feast
On the inside arrangement you praise or blame.
Outside should suffice for evidence:
[…] ‘With this same key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart,’ […]
Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!
This is writing about literary celebrity by a sixty-four-year-old whose life has been marked by it for thirty years. It is not a poem about desire of any kind.
All of which matters because of what it leaves open, in late 1848, in the background of the Palazzo Guidi drawing room. The young Alfred Domett can’t have missed the strength of feelings that the young Robert waited till his departure to the ends of the earth to declare, but that proves nothing. Best-friendship can be intense, addictive. Mahony is another matter altogether. Bon viveur yet a life-long celibate when it comes to women, a priest ordained against his spiritual advisors’ counsels, the formerly brilliant seminarian expelled for drunken socialising with his students: he seems likely to know exactly what and whom he desires.
Does this cross Elizabeth’s mind as she sits in the green drawing room, watching the clock and making sure a spittoon is to hand? Probably not. With her father’s literal-mindedness about religion, she takes Mahony’s alleged priesthood as guarantee that he must be a better man than he appears. Besides, she’s pregnant, just two years married and very much in love, with a certainty that’s helped her to brave parental abandonment, storms at sea, miscarriage, and the risk of social stigma. Compared to all this, someone flirting with the man who loves her is just the faint buzz of a Florentine mosquito. And of course in the end she wins: eventually, Mahony leaves.
Elizabeth may be naïve but she’s tough. She has coped well with Robert’s illness. Her respect for his refusal to call a doctor isn’t hand-wringing weakness, but self-denial by someone who understands intimately a patient’s right to self-determination: ‘I wd have sent to Dr Harding without asking him [but] he never wd do such things to me .. often saying to me that he cd not treat me so, without confidence, whatever his own feelings might be:—’ She looks after her husband in other ways too. On 9 October, kneeling on a fauteuil to pray, she has a nasty, and slightly ridiculous, fall on to the tiled apartment floor. Her nose and forehead bleed, but she’s quick to reassure the recuperating Robert, confining her true feelings of anxiety that this may have endangered her pregnancy to letters home.
Such wifeliness is part of a burgeoning strength. By November the baby is kicking:
the second life—[…] is distinctly appreciable now […] the insertion of new gores & the letting out of waist-bands goes on steadily .. & the appetite is good, & the strength keeping up, & the morphine diminishing!
Times change, and while some changes, including Hugh Stuart Boyd’s death in May, are sad – most are exciting. Elizabeth is cutting out morphine after nearly thirty years of dependency. The household has acquired a cook, Alessandro, whose snobbery drives Wilson mad; but the maid herself, ‘our friend rather than our servant’, has become engaged to a member of the ducal guard who plans to take a palace clerkship in order to marry her (though in fact he will open a shop). Tall and good-looking, Signor Righi is the educated younger son of a doctor; his brother a wealthy merchant in nearby Prato ‘with town and country house’. It’s a relationship across religious lines, but if Wilson were to become Signora Righi she’d be almost as well off as the Brownings themselves.
Palazzo Guidi has become a real home, as full of life as any soap-opera set: shortly, when the household is completed, Elizabeth will rename it Casa Guidi. As she turns forty-three she’s in her prime, and to cap it all on 9 March 1849, three days after her birthday, she gives birth to a healthy little boy. Though the labour is fairly long – twenty-one hours ‘during the whole of which time she never once cried out, or shed a tear’ – it’s shorter than her first miscarriage, and Elizabeth’s years of struggle with her body have prepared her for it. At a quarter past two in the morning ‘the very model of a beautiful boy’ is born. ‘The nurse says of the babe “e stato ben nutrito”, “how well nourished he has been”.’
Robert has stayed with Elizabeth holding her hand for as much of the labour as Dr Harding, the midwife Madame Biondi and Wilson, who are all in attendance, will allow ‘& I comforted myself by pulling his head nearly off.’ For her, ‘The first cry came to me in the rapture of a surprise! […] it had always seemed to me reasonable to expect some evil about the child—malformation if nothing else.’ But Robert, whose proud announcement of the birth appears in The Times on 19 March, is in no doubt that it’s the reward ‘for her perfect goodness, patience, selfdenial and general rationality. That resolution of leaving off the morphine, for instance—’ In fact, healthy late childbearing is also in the family genes: soon Henrietta too will give birth three times between the ages of forty-two and forty-seven, to two sons and a daughter.
The ‘little fellow grows prettier and bigger visibly’ daily, and the new mother thrives too, as Robert records with exuberance. Though her milk has come in, she follows custom by choosing not to breast-feed. In the first week three balie, or wet nurses, don’t work out, but by 18 March a fourth, Tecla Celavini, has been engaged. This ‘mighty woman, that would cut up into twenty Bas, aged 26, with a child of not yet a month old—good-natured, and intelligent spite of her fat cheeks which overflow her neck as she bends down’ will remain with the Brownings for over two years. But the date she arrives has a double significance. Early in the pregnancy, when Robert was ill, Elizabeth had written to Miss Mitford, ‘Nobody was ever born to be happier & unhappier than I—the “mingled yarn” is black & white.’ Now the ‘mingled yarn’ knots tight, for on the day Tecla arrives, Robert’s beloved mother dies of a heart attack without having ever met her daughter-in-law or known she has a grandchild. From elation at the birth, Robert crashes into a depressive grief: ‘Just because he was too happy when the child was born, the pain was overwhelming afterwards. […] While he was full of joy for the child,—his mother was dying at a distance, and the very thought of accepting that new affection for the old, became a thing to recoil from.’
There may in any case have been something fragile about this slightly hyperactive joy, for Robert’s sense of his own self continues to take a battering. In January Chapman and Hall published his selected Poems, omitting both Strafford, the drama he wrote for Macready, and Sordello, the long poem which in 1840 destroyed his precociously brilliant reputation. As Miss Mitford says (behind Elizabeth’s back), his poetry is now regularly dismissed as ‘one heap of obscurity confusion & weakness […] book upon book all bad […] the first edition of each hav
ing gone off in the form of waste paper’. Critics are slow to change a pigeonhole, and Poems’s reception is poor. The Eclectic Review rakes up Sordello to review alongside it, while The Atlas opens with that ‘prodigious mistake’ before going on to dedicate its review to a nit-picking appraisal of Robert’s revisions. The English Review claims the poems are immoral (and that, for example, ‘Pippa Passes’ advocates suicide) and, while the book receives serious, glowing reviews from John Forster in The Examiner and, among several positive notices in the US, Edwin Percy Whipple in Graham’s American Monthly, the Morning Post is swingeing:
We have searched in vain […] for a single passage that would place our author in a favourable light before the public, and we feel no small degree of mortification in having wasted so much profitable time in a pursuit which has proved so unpleasant and abortive.
Small wonder perhaps that the loss of his mother, that loving, unconditional admirer, overwhelms Robert. Worries about Elizabeth giving birth abroad have been triumphantly assuaged, but this sudden bereavement underscores the couple’s distance from home. That distance helped Sarianna keep back the bad news until the baby was safely born, but now it breaks apart familial support structures. Elizabeth advises her own sisters not to visit their sister-in-law with support and condolences, lest Papa create a row and intensify Sarianna’s suffering. Robert no longer wants to take a planned trip to England, because his mother ‘was so longingly anxious to have us back again .. and we waiting till it was just too late for our return to make her happy’.
The new mother swallows down her disappointment: she won’t be able to show off her baby to her sisters. Things are so bad that by early May that she’s relieved when Robert is still going through the motions with his baby, ‘& goes to see him bathed every morning & walks up & down on the terrace with him in his arms’. As she tells Sarianna, ‘If your dear father can toss & rock babies, as Robert can, he will be a nurse in great favour.’ It seems only logical to help her husband by reinforcing the positive, so she decides the baby should take her late mother-in-law’s maiden name. He’s christened Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning on 26 June in the Evangelical Church, and Elizabeth insists he’s to be known as Wiedeman – though before he turns three, the irrepressible Barrett habit of nicknames will have transformed this to Pen, a name which sticks for the rest of his life.