Charlotte Mew

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  In spite of this Poe-like vision, the narrator harshly refuses to stay. Suppressing her own conscience, she escapes (a cab happens to be passing) to her own home and family. Her brother’s friends have arrived, there are lights and dancing, and she waltzes all night. The next day, feeling uneasy, she goes back to the church, where she is vexed by a ‘mumbling priest’ and empty ritual. Then two children come in hand in hand, one of them an idiot. ‘Her shifting eyes and ceaseless imbecile grimace chilled my blood. The other, who stood praying, turned suddenly and kissed the dreadful creature by her side … I shuddered, and yet her face wore no look of loathing nor of pity. The expression was a divine one of habitual love.’

  Snow is falling as the narrator (who is never given a name) leaves the church, conscience-stricken. Her only chance of peace is to find the girl she rejected so cruelly the night before and make amends. But no one knows anything, no one can direct her, the search is useless. ‘Some months afterwards,’ in a large glittering shopping street, the girl walks past her, clinging to the arm of a man. Obviously she is now a prostitute, or, as Charlotte puts it, one of ‘the dazzling wares of the human mart’. And the man – the same man, of course, who seduced the sister – is wearing a buttonhole of scented violets. The story ends with ‘a laugh mounting to a cry.… Did it proceed from some defeated angel? Or the woman’s mouth? Or mine? God knows.’

  Passed seems almost as over-written as a story can be, hurrying along in distraught paragraphs, only just hanging on, for decency’s sake, to its rags of English grammar. Odd though it is, the elements are familiar. The overwrought narrator has something about her of Lucy Snow in Villette, and there are echoes of Charlotte Brontë’s ‘flash-eliciting, truth-extorting’ style. The pathos of the bunch of violets suggests a number of popular novels, in particular Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely But Too Well. The whole business of hurrying in desperation through a maze of mean streets is one of romance’s standbys. Dickens, if he didn’t invent it, used it to great effect for poor Florence Dombey and Little Dorrit. As to the blank encounter and the cry of despair at the end of Passed, not to mention the mumbling priest and the cynical seducer, they are part of the mythology of the nineteenth century’s unreal city.

  All the same, Passed makes its impact. Charlotte originally gave it the title Violets, but Passed gives a better sense of missed opportunity. Her story is impossible, but it is true. The real subject is guilt – the guilt of the provided-for towards the poor, the sane towards the mad, and the living towards the dead. The motive force is everything she had once half-understood about Miss Bolt and the disgraceful Fanny, all her feelings for her mad brother and sister, for her dead little brother and the dead Elizabeth Goodman, even for Anne. These had to be expressed in images, or they would have broken her.

  Harland loved Passed. True, he favoured hurrying-through-the-mean-streets stories, and was to accept some particularly absurd examples. But Passed seemed to him not only a remarkable literary achievement, but original, and therefore bound to be violently abused, which was just what The Yellow Book wanted. He wrote (28 April 1894) a letter of acceptance, with two qualifications – he couldn’t pay much, and he would like one or two ‘very trifling’ changes in the text. According to Harland, he had to read mountains of manuscripts every day, and nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand were rubbish. When he picked one up at random he assumed it would be worthless, but this time he had a strange presentiment, and had turned to his sub-editor and told him he felt he was going to make a great find. This, of course, is the way editors talk, American ones in particular. It gave Harland the opportunity to ask Charlotte to call on him at his flat, 144 Cromwell Road, at 3 p.m. the following Monday.

  Charlotte by this time had taken to wearing a mannish black velvet jacket and tweed skirt, as close as possible to Lucy Harrison’s style, but in a miniature version. Her manner was unpredictable, but it would have taken more than that to disconcert Harland, who was used to dealing with Aubrey Beardsley and his sister Mabel, ‘Graham Tomson’ and ‘George Egerton’ (who were both strong-minded women), the ambiguous Frederick Rolfe, and the novelist ‘Victoria Crosse’ who specialized in faintly moustached heroines. Charlotte, however, seems not to have set out to intrigue or amuse him, although she could have done both. She simply asked whether she could be paid at once. This in itself is an indication of how things were at 9 Gordon Street.

  Harland sheltered behind his publishers, telling her that they normally paid on publication, but that if she was really in difficulties (most of his authors were, but he made it sound something quite unusual) he would ‘speak to Mr Lane’. Lane, as he very well knew, was generous, but neither prompt nor just in making payments. (The only one of his writers who ever got the better of him was Laurence Housman, who wired: ‘Dear Lane, my rascal of a publisher won’t settle my account. Can you lend me £50?’) Tactfully enough, Harland turned the subject to the trifling alterations. He wanted the story toned down, particularly ‘the description of your almost delirious horror in the presence of the dead’. ‘The starting eyeballs’ ought to be cut out, too, and the ‘stiffening limbs’. ‘Of course the substance wouldn’t be altered,’ he told the protesting Charlotte, and he very much admired the psychology of the story and the strong sensual impressions; it was just that poignant subjects were best treated lightly and easily, and allowed to speak for themselves. This was very good advice, and Charlotte Mew always wrote at her best when she followed it.

  He asked her to call again so that he could go over the whole piece with her, point by point. Passed was published in its revised form in the second volume of The Yellow Book, for July 1894. This meant that Charlotte made her first appearance in most distinguished company, alongside Henry James’s The Coxon Fund, Ella D’Arcy’s brilliant Cousin Louis and John Davidson’s Thirty Bob a Week. There were six drawings by Beardsley, including one of the most striking he ever did, Garçons de Café, and Charlotte was placed well up the paper, at No. VI. She could hardly have made a better start.

  That summer she entered the new world of the New Woman. It was an exhilarating place, which Netta Syrett describes in her autobiography The Sheltering Tree and Evelyn Sharp in Unfinished Adventure. Although the public, discreetly prompted by Lane, thought of The Yellow Book as bizarre and decadent, and though its male writers were often alcoholic, weak-willed and tired of life, its women were strong. Evelyn Sharp, who was one of them, wrote that they ‘felt on the crest of the wave that was sweeping away the Victorian tradition’, and that everything must go. Netta, Evelyn and Ella D’Arcy, like Charlotte, had seen The Yellow Book announcement and sent in their first contributions to Lane. They were also among Lane’s Keynotes – that is, they contributed to a special ‘advanced’ series of stories, each with their own Keynote, designed by Beardsley. ‘Petticoat’ Lane liked to be seen with women round him, ‘and we fell in and out of love,’ said Evelyn, ‘with or without disaster, like other people’. They would find time for marriage some day, but not yet, there was too much in hand. Everything was open for discussion. Netta Syrett, in particular, talked unconcernedly about sex, for her uncle, the writer Grant Allen, was a frank materialist and had brought her up to do so. But this was only one aspect of a world that had grown limitless, but still had to be put to rights. Skimming from one end of London to the other on their bicycles, without fear, without chaperones, they lodged two and two in flats, or in the newly opened Victorian Club in Sackville Street, which had small, cold, candle-lit bedrooms for professional women. If need arose they could emerge soignées and glittering, in the full evening dress of the nineties. These young women were not Bohemians, they were dandies. They complained when the down-and-out Frederick Rolfe, on his visits to Harland’s flat, left lice on the furniture. Aubrey Beardsley was ‘a dear boy’ to them. They had no intention of drifting or failing, they meant to rise with the coming twentieth century.

  All of them loved Henry Harland, who knew exactly how to treat them. ‘Darling of my heart!’ he greeted t
hem, ‘Child of my editing!’ When he had to give in, at last, to ill-health, and retired to Dieppe, they descended like a welcome flock of birds on his villa, and later at his boarding-house. There, according to Evelyn Sharp, the dying Harland was Harland still. Asked by the lady next to him to pass the salt, he exclaimed: ‘Dear lady, it is yours! And may I not also pass you the mustard?’

  Charlotte Mew certainly went to the Harlands’ Saturday evenings in Cromwell Road, in the pink drawing-room with its Persian carpet, evenings to remember, when there were songs at the piano in French, Italian and German, and the young ones gazed in reverence at Henry James, who walked up and down the room, searching for a word to finish his sentence. Everyone knew what it was, but nobody dared to supply it. Harland himself, though often drunk, was never at a loss; the other young women had much more confidence than Charlotte in dealing with life, although her experience of suffering went quite as deep as theirs. Among unfamiliar faces, she was still uncertain of herself.

  But to her old friends – the Olivers, the Chicks, dreary Maggie Browne, even the Millards – Charlotte seemed to have become precisely the New Woman of whom the newspapers complained. It was true that she was still living with her family, but now she ranged about London in her tailor-mades and close-cropped hair, dropping in on new acquaintances, or watching the street life. She used rough language which they had never heard from her before. She smoked continually, rolling her own cigarettes. Her head may have been turned a little in the summer of 1894. But if it was, and if she neglected Anne and these old friends a little, they made no protest. They had always known she would distinguish herself.

  Of all The Yellow Book women whom Charlotte met during those months, the one who deeply impressed her was Harland’s enigmatic, handsome ‘office help’, Ella D’Arcy. Ella (it was her real name, though publishers wouldn’t believe it) was born in 1857, the daughter of an Irish grain merchant. She had been brought up in the Channel Islands, talked French fluently, and had once hoped to be painter. When she was just about to leave the Slade, however, to study in Paris, her eyes began to trouble her, and she had taken, with a kind of casual energy, to writing. After sending out a quantity of short stories, with very few acceptances, she too had seen The Yellow Book announcement. Her Irremediable, which appeared in the first number, had already been turned down by Blackwood’s because the editor thought it treated marriage with insufficient respect. Harland saw its quality at once, and begged her for more. She became The Yellow Book’s most frequent contributor, and all her stories are good, though they go back time and again to the subject of the ordinary decent man reduced to nothing by a stupid woman. This pity for men can only have come from her own good nature. She had a hard enough struggle to support herself, and took lovers as she chose, without drawing any particular attention to it. Frederick Rolfe, who could not stand her (it was Ella who had complained about his lice), called her a ‘mouse-mannered piece of sex’, probably Harland’s mistress. What was more, he said, she had stolen two volumes of Harland’s Encyclopaedia. But ‘mouse-mannered’ seems not quite right for this dark, handsome, untidy-looking, witty woman, who was more likely to give than to take. It was from her that Charlotte learned for the first time to read French literature, Flaubert in particular. Ella lent her the just-published four volumes of Flaubert’s correspondence, and probably pressed on her, as she did on everyone, Rimbaud’s Illuminations. But here Ella was ahead of her time and could not find, she said, in the whole of England, anyone to understand Rimbaud.

  All the Keynotes worried over Ella’s penniless state. It was no good asking her to stay, she was ‘Goblin Ella’, come and gone while your back was turned. Her worries at this time went deeper than most of them guessed. But she shrugged them off. About her entire behaviour there seemed to be a kind of heedless fascination which turned the whole current of Charlotte’s being painfully towards her. Then, just as Charlotte was getting down to work on a new story, something longer, she hoped, and more ambitious, Ella disappeared. She went first to the Channel Islands, then to Juan les Pins, then took a room in Paris.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The China Bowl

  HARLAND is said to have told Charlotte Mew that if she gave up her family and friends, and shut herself away to write, she could do wonders. This may well have been one of his general stock of editor’s remarks, and it shows that he knew nothing about the oppressive secrets of 9 Gordon Street, but if he had no means of understanding Charlotte, he certainly intended to encourage her. It was greatly to her credit that she didn’t attempt another study in the style of Passed, which he had liked so much, or, indeed, in the style of anything else which had appeared in The Yellow Book.

  She wanted a different setting and other lives than her own. The China Bowl is a long and tragic story of a Cornish fisherman, David Parris, torn between his proud mother and his savage wife. The wife, to assert her independence, sells a china bowl, the family heirloom, to an artistic ‘lady visitor’. David for the only time in his life loses his temper and, although his wife is pregnant, hits her. She leaves home and in desperation he takes out his boat in a storm and is lost at sea.

  It sounds like a regional play for radio and that, in fact, sixty years later, was what it became. But why did Charlotte Mew write it in 1895? She made her first visit to Cornwall in the nineties, and it left her, as she said, homesick to the end of her life for ‘Newlyn lights’. Newlyn was then still a fishing village, whose street and harbour lights shone suddenly out of the darkness as you walked round the headland by the coast road, but since the 1880s a community of artists had settled in, with the doubtful approval of the locals, and formed a kind of Plein Air school of genre painting. In summer there were concerts and studio exhibitions and lodgings in the whitewashed cottages for Londoners, and it is significant that in Charlotte’s story the ‘artistic lady visitor’ plays an ungrateful part. It is as though she was seeing herself, as she often did, with painful irony, from the outside.

  In Cornwall Charlotte, who was a passionate reader of Thomas Hardy, recognized the truth of a passage in his preface to A Pair of Blue Eyes: ‘The place is pre-eminently (for one person at least) the region of dream and mystery. The ghostly birds, the pall-like sea, the frothy wind, the eternal soliloquy of the waters, the bloom of dark purple cast that seems to exhale from the shoreward precipices, in themselves lend to the scene an atmosphere like the twilight of a night vision.’ The women of her story, too, are Hardy-like in their strength, but in A Pair of Blue Eyes itself the only character who is actually Cornish is William Worm, described by Hardy as ‘a dazed factotum’ and brought in purely for comic relief.

  Charlotte seems to have studied the dialect for herself, and tried to use it seriously. The starting-point of her story was probably the best-known picture of the whole Newlyn school, Frank Bramley’s Hopeless Dawn. Bought by the Chantrey Bequest in 1888, it was a favourite with the public then, and still is. In this cottage scene the old mother and her daughter-in-law sit together as the first light breaks, waiting in vain for news of their man out at sea. On the table are two china bowls which Bramley, who specialized in cross-lights, put there to reflect the first gleam from the window. The bowls are much finer in quality than anything else in the room. They seem to suggest a story of their own.

  But in spite of her commitment to The China Bowl, Charlotte could not quite bring it off. Her three main characters are stylized almost to the extent of the Aran islanders in Riders to the Sea (which, however, was written eight years later) but without Synge’s lucky touch. They are stiff, as though they had learned their parts with an effort. David is absurdly noble, and although Susannah’s fierce rebellion and her determination to be something on her own account are deeply felt, she is not too convincing either. The curious thing is that Charlotte had been familiar with storms and fishing-boats since she was a child, and if she had set her story in the Isle of Wight she would have had no trouble with the dialect at all, it would have come to her naturally. But clearly that wa
s impossible. The Island was no longer picturesque to her. The Mews went there now only to visit Freda in the Whitelands Mental Hospital.

  Frank Bramley: Hopeless Dawn (Tate Gallery)

  The fifteen thousand word manuscript arrived in Harland’s flat in the January of 1895. The Chief seems to have been somewhat taken aback, but rose to the challenge, writing that it was the greatest literary experience he had enjoyed this long while. The China Bowl had ‘supreme emotion and true tragic sense’ and he compared the style to the rich and beautiful notes of ‘cello music. He was confined to Cromwell Road at the moment, not being able to face the January fog, but he would tell his wife to write and propose a day for Charlotte to come to tea. One senses a note of caution here. Harland added that there was only one drawback. He had to admit that The China Bowl, as it stood, was too long for The Yellow Book.

  But it was not as long as Henry James’s The Coxon Fund, which Harland had printed in July 1894 alongside Charlotte’s Passed, and he must have known this, and known that she knew it. He had, however, another suggestion – The China Bowl might go into a collection which he was anxious to make (presumably for publication by Lane). In fact, that was why he was so impatient for the tea-party. He had a million things to say, but he particularly wanted to discuss the collection.

  Charlotte was hurt. She believed she had put her very best into her Cornish tragedy. Writers are not rational on the subject of their favourite work. But in any case it was characteristic of her that after a disappointment she closed up, and said no more about it. The China Bowl had not been thought good enough for The Yellow Book. She threw it into a drawer and left it there for three years.

  After this she never contributed to The Yellow Book again. The reason for this, however, was peculiar to Miss Lotti. In April 1895 the scandal of Oscar Wilde’s arrest became public news, and The Yellow Book (for which he had never written anything) was involved in his headlong fall to disgrace. The public’s instinct connected Beardsley with Wilde, as someone much too clever and therefore unwholesome and expendable. Stones were thrown at the windows of John Lane’s office in Vigo Street, Beardsley was dismissed and the magazine, after missing one number, was reorganized without him. Lane himself was in America at the time and Ella D’Arcy always insisted that if he had been there things would have gone very differently. But they were left to Chapman, the office manager, who lost his head.