The very issue of The Sunday Times that contained the charwoman’s revelations included a warning squib about the “poet of fashion.” He begins by dining out in “Park-lane” with dukes, dowagers, and dandies, but soon finds his invitations sliding down the social scale, first to “Sloane-street,” then to Soho, and finally to “Barge-yard,” by which time the only admirers of his works are “squab city misses” keen for him to inscribe their albums.
By now Letitia’s equivocations were already wearing thin, but there was no one in literary London she did not attempt to cultivate. The sheer number of her contacts is dizzying. Anyone she met was a networking opportunity, and she was only too happy to offer Jerdan’s services as a fixer. “I think you might most advantageously communicate with Mr Jerdan, who I know is in the confidence of several of our leading statesmen,” she confided confidentially to one correspondent.
She continued to entertain, though her parties now took place in the Misses Lance’s dingy downstairs parlor at 22 Hans Place. Fancy dress was sometimes required. On one occasion Letitia appeared as Perdita. Whether she was meant to be Shakespeare’s innocent shepherdess, or the courtesan Mary Robinson who had made her name playing the role onstage, was left unsaid.
Letitia’s visiting card survives, stuck into an album by a fan. The diminutive words “Miss L. E. Landon” are dwarfed by the florid embossed border. The name is cheaply printed, not expensively engraved. It speaks of “keeping up appearances.”
According to Katherine Thomson, Letitia’s manic socializing left her with little time for intimacy: “her usual regards never sank skin-deep into her heart. How could they? There were such large demands made upon her good-will; she had such dozens of very particular dear friends; such scores of admirers and worshippers.”
The true reason why she put so much effort into keeping so many contacts in play was precisely to avoid intimacy—and to control the spread of gossip. For the rest of her life, she had to contend with a constant drip-drip of low-level mockery in the press, and the possibility that a factual report as potentially damaging as that in The Sunday Times might again emerge.
After 1826, Letitia’s position was in reality so compromised that she probably did not receive quite as many invitations as her memoirists later implied. When she was invited, she was sometimes snubbed. “I avoided L.E.L., who looked the very personification of Brompton—pink satin dress and white satin shoes, red cheeks, snub nose, and hair à la Sappho,” Benjamin Disraeli recorded, having cut her at a party in 1832.
The table Letitia frequented most often was probably Jerdan’s. Tom Moore sat next to her at a dinner party there in 1830. By way of making conversation, he averred to Miss Landon that no doubt she dined out all the time. Oh no, she replied. Most evenings she just wandered the local streets on her own, looking in the shop windows and watching the mail coach going by. Despite her bantering tone she was probably speaking something like the truth.
Moore summed up “Miss L.E.L.” as “girlish enough in manner (affectedly so indeed) but no girl at heart.” Like many of the male writers of the day, he regarded her as “no exception to the bad opinion I entertain of such literary hermaphrodites—this sort of talent unsexes a woman.” By an unsexed woman he did not mean an unsexy woman, and certainly not a woman regarded as a male equal. He meant a woman who had forfeited her feminine claim on men’s respect and chivalrous protection.
As the delicate balance of her reputation tipped inexorably from fame to shame, Letitia would find it increasingly harder to collect allies, especially among ladies. Mary Russell Mitford later took umbrage when she wrote to her as “My dear Miss Mitford,” despite their both being former pupils of Miss Rowden. Although Miss Mitford admitted that she did not regard Letitia as a stranger, she took fright at the familiarity. Letitia was forced to apologize.
From 1826 on, Letitia was a constant butt of satire in the press. In this 1832 cartoon, “Puff” and his Protegée, Jerdan is shown smoking a cigar before a fireplace over which hangs a portrait of his “Brompton Sappho” in a skimpy Grecian robe.
CHAPTER 7
Lyre Liar
“True” and “false” are treacherous words in Letitia Landon’s lexicon, miniature bombs that threaten to explode at any moment. She used them to play on ideas of veracity versus deceit, fidelity versus betrayal, the fallen versus the “honest” woman. In her early lyric “Truth,” she even employed the title as a coy euphemism for sexual intercourse.
In the age of cant, the high-flown vocabulary of sensibility—truth and nature, soul and spirit—was reduced to a carnal code. Letitia would not have read the famous final lines of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”—
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know
—as the gateway to some profound metaphysical mystery. She would have taken them as a teasingly empty tautology, gesturing toward an enigma that was in fact tragically banal: that in a fallen, materialist universe, art can aspire to nothing more elevated than the meaningless condition of sex.
From the start, L.E.L. deconstructed Romantic ideals, even as she constructed them. She embraced the fall into irony. “O say not that truth does not dwell with the lyre / That the Minstrel will feign what he never has felt,” she wrote in 1822, employing for the first time the homonym on “lyre” and “liar” that became one of her idées fixes.
The lyre—from which “lyric” poetry derives—was the ultimate Romantic symbol of unforced expressivity, adopted by Shelley and carved in stone on Keats’s grave. As Sappho’s iconic attribute, it was, however, particularly associated with female genius. Madame de Staël, for example, was portrayed holding one in her 1809 portrait by the artist Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun.
Keats’s grave, with lyre, in the English cemetery at Rome
As conduits of creativity, women were supposed to be as natural and unselfconscious and passive as an Aeolian lyre or wind harp. However, the lyre was also a prop in the feminine masquerade. Chic Regency ladies, from actresses to aristocrats to Madame de Staël, were portrayed strumming on newfangled drawing-room variants, such as the harp-lute and lyre-guitar, exquisite examples of which survive, manufactured by Edward Light of London. As a fashion statement, the lyre straddled the symbolic fault line between authenticity and artifice, a tension brilliantly deployed by Goya in his portrait of the Marchioness of Santa Cruz holding a lyre-guitar (1805). The reclining sitter’s awkward posture belies her attempt to present herself au naturel. She has wild foliage in her hair, but her feet stick out uncomfortably in pointy satin slippers from beneath her faux-Grecian gown.
The Marchioness of Santa Cruz by Goya, 1805
No poet was more alert to the contradictions of the lyre than Letitia. But if she was an Aeolian lyre herself, what she channeled was not the natural inspiration of Shelley’s “wild West Wind” but the “spirit of the age,” to use a phrase coined in her lifetime. She knew her genius was not transcendent but a product of the society in which she lived, which saw the image of the lyre become a mass-produced design cliché, stamped on innumerable book spines and incorporated into sofa tables, chairs, and wrought-iron railings.
Letitia’s next collection, The Venetian Bracelet, published in 1829, included a poem titled “A History of the Lyre.” It features a poetess-heroine whose imagination is compared to a stream whose “wave” is “lost in artificial waterfalls” or “coop’d up” to make the “useless fountain of a palace hall.” The new collection exposes how trapped as an artist Letitia had become in the work of spinning her “public character,” as she trod an increasingly tortured line between artifice and authenticity, disguise and self-exposure.
Madame de Staël with lyre by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, 1809
It opened with a prose preface in which, for the first time, Letitia Landon stepped outside her poetry to address her readers in what purporte
d to be her own real voice. Blanking out L.E.L.’s erotic history, she offered a seemingly heartfelt apologia for her “choice of love” as her “source of song.” Seizing the moral high ground, she borrowed the poetess credo of her more respectable rival Mrs. Hemans, who championed feminine sentimentalism as a bulwark against the selfish individualism of modern society. Letitia could thus reconfigure the titillating masochistic theatrics of her earlier work as altruism: she modestly asserted that her only purpose in engaging readers’ feelings with stories of unhappy love was to help them become more ethical and empathetic.
That was, however, a politic act of gamesmanship conceived in response to the gossip about her private life. She went on to declare with wide-eyed innocence that if readers concluded from her verses that she “must have an unhappy passion” of her own, she was wholly unconscious of the fact. Presenting herself as passive and unknowing as an Aeolian lyre, she even claimed to have no more access to her own authorial intention than any reader. The “variety of opinions offered” on her poetry, she wrote, “have left me somewhat in the situation of the prince in the fairy tale, who, when in the vicinity of the magic fountain, found himself so distracted by the multitude of voices that directed his way, as to be quite incapable of deciding which was the right path.” L.E.L. was reduced to a textual crux or rhetorical aporia. Letitia herself slipped silently away, leaving a disconcerting void.
Critics at the time were profoundly unsettled by the extreme moral and philosophical relativism they found in The Venetian Bracelet. It disturbed them far more than L.E.L.’s earlier innuendos had done. “In reading many of her poems,” went one review, “we caught ourselves saying instinctively, ‘There is falsehood here.’ But on a second perusal, in a different state of mind, we are sure that we might have said, ‘There is truth here.’ Is truth variable then? Is there no external standard to distinguish it from its contrary?”
The most striking piece in the volume was the deceptively simple “Lines of Life,” arguably Letitia’s signature poem. The title was taken from Shakespeare’s bitter and enigmatic Sonnet XVI, which casts doubt on the truth of art, and on the ability of “barren rhyme” and “painted counterfeit” to transcend time or even communicate.
“Lines of Life” reads like a perverse parody of an evangelical hymn, and draws us into such a vortex of multiple ironies that it becomes almost an antipoem. L.E.L. twines us, and is herself twined, in the classic philosopher’s “liar’s paradox.” Is she, the poem asks, a truth-telling liar or a lying truth-teller? Either way, the reader is placed in an impossible position. So is the poet, who can only be true to herself by being false to herself, since personal honesty is an act of self-betrayal.
She begins with an aggressive refusal to reveal her inner self, which turns, paradoxically, into a confession of her complicity in the culture of lies:
Well, read my cheek, and watch my eye,—
Too strictly school’d are they,
One secret of my soul to show,
One hidden thought betray.
I never knew the time my heart
Looked freely from my brow;
It once was check’d by timidness,
’Tis taught by caution now.
I live among the cold, the false,
And I must seem like them;
And such I am, for I am false
As those I would condemn.
I teach my mouth its sweetest smile,
My tongue its softest tone;
I borrow others’ likeness, till
Almost I lose my own.
I pass through flattery’s golden sieve
Whatever I would say;
In social life, all, like the blind,
Must learn to feel their way.
I check my thoughts like curbed steeds
That struggle with the rein;
I bid my feelings sleep, like wrecks
In the unfathom’d main.
I hear them speak of love, the deep,
The true, and mock the name;
Mock at all high and early truth,
And I too do the same.
I hear them tell some touching tale,
I swallow down the tear;
I hear them name some generous deed,
And I have learnt to sneer.
I hear the spiritual, the kind,
The pure, but named in mirth;
Till all of good, ay, even hope,
Seem exiled from our earth.
And one fear, withering ridicule,
Is all that I can dread;
A sword hung by a single hair
For ever o’er the head.
We bow to a most servile faith,
In a most servile fear;
While none among us dares to say
What none will choose to hear.
And if we dream of loftier thoughts,
In weakness they are gone;
And indolence and vanity
Rivet our fetters on.
These lines are indeed an authentic dispatch from the heart of the hypocrisy culture in which Letitia actually lived. The trouble is that as the poem changes gear halfway through, she gives such an over-the-top performance of self-abnegation that we begin to doubt her sincerity.
She puts on a recital of such shrinking modesty—complete with reference to the blushing cheek, an image she so often used erotically—that we begin to wonder whether this poem too is just another act:
Oh! not myself,—for what am I?
The worthless and the weak,
Whose every thought of self should raise
A blush to burn my cheek.
We doubt her, yet at the same time we believe her. Her show of exaggerated non-self really does expose the flip side of fame’s bloated ego, the vanishingly low self-esteem that results from living “only in others’ breath.”
At its turning point, “Lines of Life” attempts to claim for art the capacity to transcend debased individuality and indeed time itself, in answer to the doubts expressed in Shakespeare’s sonnet. L.E.L. makes a halfhearted Shelleyan gesture toward identifying herself as the vessel through which the transcendent spirit-power of poetic genius has poured. However, she instantly subverts the ideal. She can still only seek validation from her audience, to whom she gives the power to determine whether or not her art is “vain” (literally, from the Latin root, “empty”):
But song has touch’d my lips with fire,
And made my heart a shrine;
For what, although alloy’d, debased
Is in itself divine.
I am myself but a vile link
In earth’s dark weary chain;
But I have spoken hallow’d words,
Oh do not say in vain!
The final stanzas yearn toward the only immortality available in an atheist’s universe: posthumous fame. L.E.L. romantically rests her hope in being understood “long after life has fled” by lovelorn young maidens and pale youths with poetic souls. Will such readers of the future, she asks, keep her alive by choosing, “from many an antique scroll besides,” that which bears her name? Letitia Landon lived in an age of mass print, not parchment scrolls. Even as she sought the understanding of futurity, she undermined her own hopes as futile.
When Virginia Woolf read “Lines of Life” a century on, she thought it the most risibly “insipid” poem she had ever seen. Influenced by her friend Doris Enfield’s biography, she believed L.E.L. to be a wishy-washy schoolgirl virgin. Yet the ever-sensitive Woolf must have realized subliminally that something much darker was going on beneath the surface. Mere insipidity cannot explain either her fascination or her extreme reaction.
In Woolf’s novel Orlando, the time-traveling, gender-bending protagonist enters
the nineteenth century in a woman’s body, to find herself sitting at a desk, pen in hand. She is viscerally nauseated when stanzas from “Lines of Life” spew incontinently forth on the page before her. Nothing, Woolf writes, could be more “revolting.” Orlando is relieved when she knocks over the ink bottle, blotting out the lines, she hopes, forever.
Woolf recoiled in such disgust because she intuitively sensed the poem’s submerged emotional violence and acerbic passive aggression, which were secretly rooted in Letitia’s personal situation. She was also involuntarily sucked into Letitia’s strange circle of self-harm, acting out the fear of “withering ridicule” depicted in the poem itself. Only now that we know the truth about Letitia’s double life can we begin to understand her literary voice. Like Heinrich Heine, she was an exponent of the Romantic irony that is more wretched in its emptiness than the tragic sentiments it erects only to mock and deconstruct. Orlando need not have spilt the ink. Letitia had already erased herself.
“Lines of Life” is a cry of nihilistic rage and despair. It is also a twisted torch song to the hypocrisy culture on which Letitia depended for her social survival. In this, she was aided and abetted by her “respectable” friends, including Dr. and Mrs. Anthony Todd Thomson and, especially, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Carter Hall. They publicly invested in her seeming purity, and denounced the slanders against her in the memoirs they published after her death. In reality, they were deeply entangled in her private life, effective codependents in her toxic affair with Jerdan.
After Letitia died, S. C. Hall and his wife returned to her story again and again in print with an assiduousness bordering on the obsessional. They had routinely seen her, they said, at least once a week, sometimes every day, and were therefore in a position to know that the rumors about her were false. However, Hall also let slip a telling reference to a “blight in her springtime” (her original seduction by Jerdan) and admitted that the “ ‘bright ornament’ of Truth” was never hers, and that “secretiveness” was her “bane.” Only in the light of recent revelations is it clear how much the Halls’ published memories, like Katherine Thomson’s, insinuate between the lines.
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