The temptation would be either to a more consoling religious faith than she had ever had, or to no faith at all. But in 1910, when Alfred Noyes’s Collected Poems came out, she read his The Old Sceptic and reflected that as far as sentiment went, she might have written the poem herself.
I pierced my father’s heart with a murmur of unbelief,
He only looked in my face as I spoke, but his mute eyes cried
Night after night in my dreams, and he died
In grief, in grief.
The point of Noyes’s poem is that the sceptic has taught himself to doubt so efficiently that he finds he is beginning to doubt doubt and disbelieve in disbelief. This, it seems, was also Charlotte Mew’s case. She turned back, as she had done before, to her childhood’s faith, with its moments of intense joy and its persistent sense of guilt. She accepted that this was a personal matter. ‘Religion is like music, one must have an ear for it,’ she wrote. ‘Some people have none at all.’
She had felt anxious about leaving Anne at home in 1909 and Edith Oliver had been enlisted to call at Gordon Street and see that the cold didn’t turn into a sore throat, or anything worse. The drains, as usual, were suspected, and in 1910 the Mews spent £100 in having them resited. At last, in 1911, the two sisters had a chance to go away together. Yet another companion had been found for Anna Maria, and Wek, so far, had not attacked her. Anne would sketch and paint, and Charlotte, perhaps, would write.
This time they went to Boulogne, booking into quite modest rooms over the Café Belle Vue, 10 Place Frédéric Sauvage. There was a good view, and the price was only 40 francs a week, but the rooms were not too clean, and the water in the tap, they found, was ‘lazy’. Charlotte, gathering her courage together, made Madame have the whole place scrubbed out, and when that was done Madame, recognizing strength when she saw it, smiled. They went to the circus and the cinema, and (accompanied by some Scottish ladies from one of the hotels) to the casino. There Charlotte and Anne ‘lost a franc or two’, but they both felt they needed peace. Gordon Street seemed ‘ten thousand miles away’, and they could relax in the old part of Boulogne, where the milk-carts were pulled by large dogs, and cars went by ‘at the pace of a hearse from a house of mourning’. Anne sketched in the fish market, Charlotte wished she too was a painter, but she was far more relaxed, far more herself, or one of her selves, than she had been with Elsie in Brittany. She lounged about the fishermen’s quarter, talking to them as they mended their nets, and offering her hand-rolled cigarettes. This time she admitted openly that she was a confirmed quay-haunter, and a watcher of ships and seamen. Her ambiguous stride, unexpected in such a tiny creature, and her hoarse little voice marked her out this time from every other lady tourist. The Boulogne fishermen accepted her, it seems, and asked her into their houses. She felt suspended between two worlds. ‘I have not told Maggie I am here,’ she wrote to Edith, ‘as I said I couldn’t go to Berkhamsted and haven’t heard anything of her for ages’. At night she went down to the quays again, to see the lights. It would be very easy to get to Paris. But she did not go. She told Edith that she was ‘too tired to face the racket’.
CHAPTER TEN
The Farmer’s Bride
BETWEEN 1909, when she published Requiescat, and the beginning of 1912, Charlotte Mew wrote no poetry at all. Then on 3 February 1912 another poem of hers appeared in The Nation. Anyone who could say what prompted her to write it, at the age of forty-two, would be able to understand the nature of the poetic impulse itself.
She gave it the title The Farmer’s Bride, though it is the farmer, not the bride, who speaks, in a voice which might be from anywhere between the Isle of Wight and Hardy’s Wessex.
Three summers since I chose a maid –,
Too young maybe – but more’s to do
At harvest-time than bide and woo.
When us was wed she turned afraid
Of love and me and all things human;
Like the shut of a winter’s day.
Her smile went out, and ’twasn’t a woman –
More like a little frightened fay.
One night, in the Fall, she runned away.
‘Out ’mong the sheep, her be,’ they said,
’Should properly have been abed;
But sure enough she wasn’t there
Lying awake with her wide brown stare.
So over seven-acre field and up-along across the down
We chased her, flying like a hare
Before our lanterns. To Church-Town
All in a shiver and a scare
We caught her, fetched her home at last,
And turned the key upon her, fast.
She does the work about the house
As well as most, but like a mouse:
Happy enough to chat and play
With birds and rabbits and such as they,
So long as men-folk keep away.
‘Not near, not near!’ her eyes beseech
When one of us comes within reach.
The women say that beasts in stall
Look round like children at her call.
I’ve hardly heard her speak at all.
Shy as a leveret, swift as he,
Straight and slight as a young larch tree,
Sweet as the first wild violets, she,
To her wild self. But what to me?
The short days shorten, and the oaks are brown,
The blue smoke rises to the low grey sky,
One leaf in the still air falls slowly down,
A magpie’s spotted feathers lie
On the black earth spread white with rime,
The berries redden up to Christmas-time.
What’s Christmas-time without there be
Some other in the house than we!
She sleeps up in the attic there
Alone, poor maid. ’Tis but a stair
Betwixt us. Oh! my God! the down,
The soft young down of her, the brown,
The brown of her – her eyes, her hair! her hair!
With these six verses Charlotte for the first time attracted notice and respect as a poet. Some readers were reminded of Sue Brideshead’s leap out of the window to get away from her husband in Jude the Obscure, or possibly Hardy’s The Homecoming, although in that poem the farmer stands no nonsense on his wedding-night:
Now don’t ye rub your eyes so red; we’re home and have no cares; Here’s a skimmer-cake for supper, peckled onions, and some pears; I’ve got a little keg o’summat strong, too, under stairs:
What, slight your husband’s victuals? Other brides can tackle theirs.
But poetry is what it sounds like, and The Farmer’s Bride, Wessex dialect or not, doesn’t sound like Hardy. The change in metre, racing along in the first four verses and breaking down, with ‘the short days shorten, and the oaks are brown’ into a dragging, faltering close, is Charlotte Mew’s own. Nor was Hardy, great situation-man as he was, likely to hit on such an improbable, inhibited, tantalizing but touching story, once again an entire life’s emotional history in a short space.
The objections are there for anyone to make, and they were made. What kind of farmer is this? Not like Hardy’s brute with a little keg o’summat strong, and, for the matter of that, not much like Charlotte’s Uncle Richard on the farm at Newfairlee. H. W. Nevinson, The Nation’s literary critic, was only one of many to find the farmer ‘much too sympathetic. A man can hardly imagine why the most sensitive of women should run out into the night to avoid him.’ A man can hardly imagine it, but Charlotte could. She knew perfectly well that a farmer was unlikely to compare his wife – say her Aunt Maggie Mew – to a violet, but she didn’t believe either that farmers never looked at wild violets, or that they couldn’t recognize a season which is beautiful because it only offers promise and cannot, by natural means, be forced into anything more. There is a curious dissociation in the poem because we are asked to pity both parties, the sweating farmer and the frightened girl, and even to see why it is that she
has to be caught. ‘So … we chased her, flying like a hare’. The ‘so’ is powerful, meaning that it was the obvious next step to take, but so is the ‘we’. It is the whole community that turns out with their lighted lanterns, because things, after all, can only be allowed to go so far and no farther, just as they were in Ken:
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 –
The girl, ‘too young, may be’, is one of those magic figures of the pre-1914 years (Kipling’s Jungle Book, W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions), a talker to birds and animals. But this gives her (unlike Mowgli and Rima) no kind of power or advantage, it only makes her seem odd. She gets more understanding, but not much more sympathy, from the women than the men. In any case, these women have their own work to do, and certainly they make no objection to her being brought back. And once she is trapped, and ‘about the house’ again, but sleeping on her own in the attic, the subject of the poem, its whole weight and impetus, is quite clear; it is frustration. In the same way that the clerk in In Nunhead Cemetery watches the train, and the clay on the gravedigger’s spade, so this bewildered farmer sees the magpie’s feathers fall. One verse more, and he will lose his grip, tear upstairs and break down the door, and then what kind of wretchedness will ensue? The poem remains as an intolerable situation, perhaps just (at the end of three years) on the point of resolution. Meanwhile ‘the brown of her – her eyes, her hair! her hair!’
The Farmer’s Bride and all the poems which were to follow it, where Charlotte Mew speaks in different voices, raise the question – why do poets impersonate at all? They may do it because they have a great deal to hide, or because (like Browning) they haven’t quite enough. They may (like Byron) be too energetic or too self-indulgent to contain themselves, they may (like Eliot) want to escape from emotion, or (like Yeats) from the unsatisfactory limitation of self. To Charlotte Mew impersonation was necessary, rather than helpful. ‘The quality of emotion’, she thought, was ‘the first requirement of poetry … for good work one must accept the discipline that can be got, while the emotion is given to one.’ And what she needed to give a voice to, as she also explained, was the cri de coeur – that is, the moment when the emotion unmistakably concentrates itself into a few words. Examples which she gave are Marguérite Gautier’s ‘Je veux vivre’ and Mrs Gamp’s ‘Drink fair, Betsy, wotever you do.’ ‘One has not only the cry but the gesture and the accent – and so one goes on – calling up witnesses to the real thing.’ A cry has to be extorted, that is its test of truth. It might make a poem, or it might not. Charlotte once saw a woman walking across Cumberland Market, in Camden Town, ‘with a tiny child holding on to her skirt, trying to keep up with her and chattering in a rather tired treble, like a chirpy little sparrow, as they went along. Suddenly the woman stopped and struck the child, with a thickly spoken “Now go and make yer bloody ’appy life miserable and stop yer bloody jaw.’” This too was a cri de coeur. As to the farmer, she believed that ‘as far as I had the use of words, they did express my idea of a rough countryman feeling and saying things differently from the more sophisticated townsman – at once more clearly and more confusedly.’
The Nation’s readers, even if they thought the farmer’s restraint unlikely, responded to the raw sensation of wanting and not getting, against the background of the season’s return. Among these readers there was a Mrs Dawson Scott, a doctor’s wife from Southall, who wrote herself, and was a most generous and determined, not to say ruthless, patron of writers. Charlotte first met her on the 30th of May 1912. Mrs Dawson Scott wasted no time. She never did. Taking at once to the new poet, whom she described in her diary as ‘an Imp with brains’, she invited her to tea immediately. Charlotte now had the curious experience which she had just glimpsed for a short while in her Yellow Book days, of being ‘taken up’.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mrs Sappho
TO TAKE UP Charlotte Mew was not an easy matter, but Mrs Dawson Scott never gave way to difficulties. Firmness was all that was needed. And yet ‘she was entirely deluded’ (according to someone who knew her well) ‘in thinking that she was fundamentally hard and lacking in affection’. She was capable of sudden infatuations and bitter disappointments, like the rest of us, but was sustained by her trust in the future and her great competence in dealing with the present. Arriving in London at the end of the 1880s, quite unheard-of and not knowing anyone, she had soon become one of Heinemann’s ‘young authors’ (though this, disappointingly, never came to much) and she made herself, over the next twenty years, into a celebrity in the world of letters. One of her most successful ideas, in later years, was International P.E.N., which brought together writers from all over the world. Mrs Dawson Scott had noticed that writing was a lonely occupation, and loneliness was something that she did not permit.
She is described as a ‘dumpy, energetic little woman’, with a round peasant face and round blue eyes. Her name was Catherine, but she was always known as Sappho (to Charlotte Mew, who got onto Christian-name terms with difficulty, as ‘Mrs Sappho’.) The nick-name came from the title of a long poem, Sappho, her first published work. There was some irony in this, for Mrs Dawson Scott, through marriage, childbirth and miscarriages, was not much interested in sex or in the female psychology, and though she considered herself, and was considered, an advanced feminist, she knew and cared little about such things. Her poem was not on the subject of lesbianism; it claimed social, but not sexual, freedom for woman. Her own energy went into organization. She was a wonderful friend, but her friends, too, must allow themselves to be organized.
Mrs ‘Sappho’ Dawson Scott
Her husband, Dr Scott (who avoided, as far as he could, her literary friends), had his practice in Southall, half an hour out of London, so that Sappho could not exactly hold a salon; still, the strength of her personality was such that people felt themselves compelled to take the train from Paddington and stay as long as they were bidden. They felt the warmth of her genuine concern. In June or July they were summoned to one of a series of cottages in Cornwall in which ‘sanitation was not a successful feature’, but there was enthusiasm, red wine, and bracing sea air on the cliff-paths, up which Mrs Dawson Scott walked barefoot, wearing a long velvet tea-gown. It is easy to criticize such people, difficult to do without them. To Sappho’s enthusiasm a surprising number of people, some of them resistant at first to any kind of patronage, owed a great deal.
It was part of her strength that she treated both celebrities and beginners in exactly the same way, and she was not daunted by Charlotte Mew. She was surprised, however, that this poet, who at forty-three was only four years younger than herself, looked at times almost like a child, with a clear, pale, unlined skin and tiny hands and feet, shod in doll’s boots. This child, or doll, often broke into rapid ungrammatical French, and then, as though dissatisfied, back into English, and swore in both languages. Her poetry was disturbing and strange, and Sappho was determined that as many people as possible should hear it. Charlotte must collect up The Farmer’s Bride and whatever else she was writing, come down at once to ‘Harden’, 6 King Street, Southall, and give a reading. The Dawson Scott principle was never to take ‘no’ for an answer, although it met on occasions Charlotte’s own everlasting no, as fiery as Carlyle’s. And even when she did come Charlotte could be farouche, or even ‘inexcusably rude’ to the company, or walk out abruptly. Privately she was half-pleased to have what she called ‘my jingles’ or ‘my damned immortal work’ recognized, and at the same time furious at something like a threat to her independence. Did Sappho, she wondered, think she was Little Tich (that is, the tiny music-hall comic, who made his entrance in enormously large shoes) or perhaps a monkey – was she supposed to perform to order? To this kind of thing Sappho, who loved a battle, stood up gallantly, saying that if Charlotte didn’t accept she’d be damned if she asked her down again. Only on one point did she lose – Charl
otte absolutely refused to come down to Cornwall. The only Cornwall for her was ‘Newlyn lights’, the stormy coast of The China Bowl.
The effect of the readings was astonishing. Only a few were asked at a time. They sat facing the little collared and jacketed figure, with her typescripts and cigarettes, who would never begin until she felt like it. Once she got started (everyone agreed) Charlotte seemed possessed, and seemed not so much to be acting or reciting as a medium’s body taken over by a distinct personality. She made slight gestures and used strange intonations at times, tones that were not in her usual speaking range. During In Nunhead Cemetery Sappho had ‘to pinch herself black and blue’, so she wrote in her diary, to keep back the tears. Evelyn Underhill, the religious poet and mystic, felt as though she was ‘having whisky with my tea – my feet were clean off the floor’. At the end Charlotte gave her characteristic toss of the head. A great friend of the Dawson Scotts, the painter Kathy Giles, took this as a signal and asked some questions, but Charlotte, looking over her head into the distance, seemed hardly conscious of them, and Miss Giles was told ‘she’s not here yet’. She seemed, quite literally, to have been carried away by the experience of reading. But the audience made no complaint, they were content to ‘receive’. Florence May Parsons, who had known Charlotte since the Temple Bar days, but had never dreamed she could do anything like this, told Sappho that she would cancel every other appointment if Charlotte was going to read, it was the ‘heart of life’ to her. Even Mrs Dawson Scott was somewhat taken aback by this. She suggested, in her straightforward way, that Charlotte was a lonely eccentric genius, like Sappho of Lesbos. ‘Is that how she strikes you?’ asked Mrs Parsons doubtfully.
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