Charlotte Mew

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  These small chosen audiences were used to readings from Swinburne, Tennyson, Francis Thompson and early Yeats – ‘the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun’; to them The Farmer’s Bride and In Nunhead Cemetery were something new and undreamed-of. By this time the avant-garde had declared itself in London, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound were on the point of launching Blast, and John Lane, ever watchful, was considering whether to publish it, and, if he did, where to give the first Vorticist dinner. But neither Pound nor Lewis had made any impression as yet on Sappho’s circle. And her guests, after all, were right. Charlotte’s poems were not like anyone else’s.

  Although the regular visitors at ‘Harden’ were not as distinguished as they later became – Sappho was really just starting and it was only in 1910 that she had persuaded her husband to live near London – they represented an expansion in Charlotte’s horizon. Sappho, at her innumerable tea-parties, was ‘full of mercurial energy, darting from guest to guest, breaking up parties which had clung together too long for her liking, leading the unknown to the known, and removing them when she thought the known had had enough’. Propelled by this unexpected force, Charlotte, by the end of 1912, was in a modest way becoming one of the known.

  FAME

  Sometimes in the over-heated house, but not for long,

  Smirking and speaking rather loud,

  I see myself among the crowd,

  Where no one fits the singer to his song,

  Or sifts the unpainted from the painted faces

  Of the people who are always on my stair;

  They were not with me when I walked in heavenly places;

  But could I spare

  In the blind Earth’s great silences and spaces,

  The din, the scuffle, the long stare

  If I went back and it was not there?

  Back to the old known things that are the new,

  The folded glory of the gorse, the sweet-briar air,

  To the larks that cannot praise us, knowing nothing of what we do

  And the divine, wise trees that do not care

  Yet, to leave Fame, still with such eyes and that bright hair!

  God! If I might! And before I go hence

  Take in her stead

  To our tossed bed,

  One little dream, no matter how small, how wild.

  Just now, I think I found it in a field, under a fence –

  A frail, dead, new-born lamb, ghostly and pitiful and white,

  A blot upon the night,

  The moon’s dropped child!

  At the literary party, perhaps, even, in the drawing-room at ‘Harden’, Charlotte sees herself ‘smirking and speaking rather loud’, but, as she admits with appalling frankness, ‘not for long’. A divided nature, it seems, can’t bear the sight of itself for more than a short time. But neither can it bear the English poet’s accepted flight to the country. In Fame Charlotte uses for the first time the images of pregnancy and stillbirth which were to recur in her later poetry, notably in Madeleine in Church and Saturday Market. The dislocation and sterility are complete. No-one fits the singer to the song, earth’s spaces are ‘blind’, Nature wisely cares nothing for us and the dream, whatever it might have been, is not only dead but huddled away under a fence in the staring moon-light, a raw abortion.

  The guilt seems more profound than any reason given for it. But Charlotte wrote the poem in 1913, when she had to contrast her own success (though she never exaggerated this) with what was happening to Anne. The fixed expenses of the Gordon Street household were Freda’s maintenance in the mental home, the rent, and the rent of the studio, and it was probably to keep the studio going that Anne now took a disagreeable job. It was in a workshop which ‘re-decorated’ – that is, faked up – seventeenth- and eighteenth-century furniture, and the conditions were no longer ladylike. It was sweated labour among the paints and varnishes. The boss, Charlotte considered, was ‘a first-class devil’. Anne had always been delicate and subject to backache, and the work left her too tired to paint anything of her own. ‘She was perfectly heroic at having no work of her own to send in anywhere, but I feel it rather keenly,’ Charlotte wrote, and, in another letter, ‘and though I am credited with a more or less indifferent front to these things – the fact is that they cut me to the heart’. This was the background of Fame. It was also why she told Sappho that ‘you made me feel rather a vampire the other evening and as if you were eventually going to present me with a heavy bill for something I never much wanted to buy – i.e. the world’s faint praise. Please let me have the estimate now, as I mayn’t be able to pay it after all.’

  These brusque remarks show Charlotte’s usual method of protecting herself. In each new environment she adapted to the expected image and produced a somewhat different personality, so that at first Mrs Dawson Scott’s Charlotte was only partly like Anne’s, or Edith Oliver’s, or Ella D’Arcy’s. At Southall she was not only somewhat fierce, but defiantly not an intellectual: ‘I read next to no poetry and understand less,’ she wrote to Sappho, and again, ‘I am a loafer and should really die of exhaustion if I had even to try to keep up with complicated people: the fishermen on the Boulogne quay are more in my way.’ When Sappho pressed a volume of Evelyn Underhill’s poems on her she said she would ‘attack it’ after a cup of Bovril and some strong nerve pills. Charlotte, in fact, was reading Flaubert as always, Chekhov, Conrad and Verlaine; the ‘only artists’ for her at the moment were Chardin, John Martin and Hogarth, and, in music, Wagner and Schubert. This suggests, as we might expect, a need to go from one extreme to the other, but not someone who has to take strong drugs before tackling a little religious verse. She wanted to be seen as a little rougher and a little more simple than she was, someone who had to brace herself up in dread before the next ‘intellectual orgy’. Sometimes she let go a little, but when she suddenly burst out one day that she didn’t know why they were all so good to her and ‘a severe silence’ fell on the company, she concluded that it served her right. On the occasions when she left abruptly, or said conspicuously the wrong thing, she felt the next day as though she would like to cut her own head off.

  But when things were not running smoothly – and the Dawson Scott marriage had its difficulties – no-one could be more quietly understanding than Charlotte Mew. ‘We only have about half-an-hour’ (on this earth), she wrote to her new friend. ‘Let’s do what we can.’

  Through all these months, Charlotte was, as she put it, ‘dog-tired with poisonous business and other diverzions’. ‘The doctor won’t give me sleeping-stuff,’ she wrote to a friend, ‘so I am fighting it out myself with the selfish resolution to put business and domestic cares behind me for a while.’ The domestic cares were the same as always, with trouble from the kitchen range and the boiler and heavy doctor’s bills for Anna Maria. The ‘diverzions’ were probably one of Charlotte’s greatest disappointments as a writer – her failure to get The China Bowl on to the stage. She had re-written it as a one-acter (by this time she had seen Synge’s Riders to the Sea), completely ruining it in the process, but she had great hopes of it, and, of course, of making money. The London managements gave their usual replies – Frederic Whelen at Wyndham’s liked the play but unfortunately his lease of the theatre was just coming to an end etc. etc., Violet Vanbrugh was also complimentary, but nothing came of it. Evelyn Millard had gone into management on her own account at the Garrick a few years earlier, and might have been ready to help, but the experiment had not been much of a success, and she had gone back to touring. Charlotte, in her usual way, flung the script into a drawer, and is said never to have looked at it again. The theatre was not her métier, but there are very few writers who don’t believe that they can do a play, and none who don’t take the rejection of a play as a personal insult.

  The first of Charlotte’s poems in print after The Farmer’s Bride were The Changeling and The Pedlar. They appeared in The Englishwoman, a short-lived monthly edited by Elisaveta Allen, the discarded wif
e of the publisher Grant Allen. The contributors formed a sympathetic genteel artistic group of their own. ‘I have a studio At Home on Saturday,’ Charlotte wrote in March 1913, ‘to see new people, which invitation I owe to the Englishwoman things.’ What these At Homes were like she described in an article published that March; one of the guests, she says, was a blind man.

  We had talked mechanically over the tea-cups: éclairs, Maeterlinck, Vesta Tilley; I would rather have asked him what he made of us from the studio patter, how we ‘saw’ this or didn’t ‘see’ it, our poses and our pictures, while the picture framed by the window which wasn’t going to be hung anywhere made no claim. The greys and greens were deepening there; the line of lamps, just lit, cut the broken mass of trees in the garden opposite; a light rain was beginning to freshen the dusty leaves.

  The Changeling and The Pedlar were both written as children’s poems, although she sometimes read them to adults, and they needed children to listen to them. One of the great attractions of the Dawson Scott household was the growing family there. These Charlotte described as ‘a delightful girl of 14 who does the housekeeping and leaves the mother free for literary work – a boy of 10, and a footpad some years younger.’ Marjorie, wise for her years, was a support to Charlotte as well, the only one she could turn to when she needed to relax her nerves at the end of a reading. The footpad, Christopher, reminded her of Elsie O’Keefe’s two boys, a couple of ‘Irish rascals’. He once offered her sixpence to make him laugh, which she appreciated, because ‘any blighter can make you cry, but only the very elect can make you laugh’. Nothing made her happier than to take Marjorie to a concert or the whole lot of them to the Zoo, with tea at the studio afterwards. Then she could be a cross between a ‘blighter’ and a kind aunt. She never let them down; she remembered too vividly what it had been like to develop mumps just before the pantomime, and to be told by Elizabeth Goodman that this would teach her submission to God’s will. And at the Zoo she was a privileged person, being on confidential terms with the parrot-house keeper, whom she consulted from time to time about Wek.

  Mrs Dawson Scott herself became fascinated by Charlotte, perhaps more so than she had bargained for. She herself had no lesbian sensibilities, and understood the dictionary meaning of the word without the least notion of the reality, or of anything of the kind ever being connected with anyone she knew or was likely to know. Still, she felt an unexplained attraction. The truth was, as she noted in her diary, that she longed for Charlotte’s ‘stimulating, irritating, interesting company, her rough ways, her genius, often rude, her little pointed face and shining waves of hair’. Once when she was sitting in the Edgware Line train, absorbed in thinking about Charlotte, both the Mew sisters unexpectedly got into the carriage, as though thought-willed, at Golders Green. ‘She is tiny, like a French Marquise,’ Sappho reflected, ‘uses amazing slang, and has ungainly movements – a queer mixture. Has a wonderful young soul, neither quite boy nor quite girl. Under the curious husk is a peculiarly sweet, humble nature.’

  In a spirit of true generosity, Sappho determined to push Charlotte a little farther in the right direction. She must meet the best-known and most influential of all the visitors to Southall, May Sinclair. In 1913 Miss Sinclair was at the height of her success as a novelist, a talented professional, kindly, enthusiastic and affairée, bustling from the Women Writers’ Suffrage League to the Society of Women Authors to the Women’s Social and Political Union, and courted by publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. She was always moving house, and yet was never without what she called ‘a writing retreat’ and a devoted servant of some kind to look after her. In this respect she was even better organized than Sappho, and could always make time for one more book (she had published eight in the last seven years) or one more introduction. Where Charlotte was awkward and uncertain, May was sophisticated and firm. She would do Charlotte all the good in the world.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  May Sinclair

  SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR called lesbianism a choice of life, but this is scarcely comprehensible. ‘We are what we are,’ wrote Charlotte Mew, ‘the spirit afterwards, but first the touch.’ She did not choose to fall in love with Lucy Harrison, or with Ella D’Arcy, and certainly not with May Sinclair.

  In 1913 May was fifty. In appearance she was small, plump and neat – Ezra Pound compared her to an acorn – with a straight nose and a fine head of hair, which made her look to advantage when photographed in profile. She looked at first sight like a nice little homebody who would make someone an excellent wife. Her eyes were dark, with a peculiar golden glow in them, but although she was charming and friendly there was a certain coldness in her manner which was disconcerting at times. May was also formidably clever, and had trained herself, under Miss Dorothea Beale of Cheltenham Ladies’ College, in philosophy.

  She came to dinner sometimes [wrote the novelist I. A. R. Wylie] and talked mainly about cats.… Once I asked J. D. Beresford to join us. He too was a philosopher and I thought between the two of them we should have a feast of reason. But philosophers, like pugilists, are wary of each other in the opening rounds and the feast threatened to be a complete frost until suddenly May Sinclair, rousing herself to the direct attack, leaned across the table and fixing her opponent with her eye demanded sternly, ‘And what, Mr Beresford, do you think of the ultimate reality?’ After which they were off.

  May had come up the hard way, with little money, a drunken father, a clinging ‘little Mamma’ and a pack of spoiled brothers. It is doubtful whether after her mother’s death she cared intensely for any living creature except her black cats Tommy (d. 1914) and Jerry (d. 1927). After the primary emotional experience she seems, although she was always surrounded with friends, to have withdrawn precisely into herself. Here there was a mystery. She worked meticulously at the background of her books, and it was said (quite wrongly) that the first time she had to write a drunk scene she sat down and got drunk herself. But all her novels are concerned with the damage men and women do to each other, and the mutual destruction of flesh and spirit. How did refined, cosy-looking Miss Sinclair (once described as ‘a small piece of upholstery rising from its seat’) know about such things? How could she write for instance (as she had in Mr and Mrs Nevill Tyson) about the feelings of a woman who has to stop feeding her baby because her jealous husband wants sex? The question was naïve, perhaps. But it corresponded to May’s own firm belief that a writer creates not from personal experience, but from imagination and knowledge of human psychology. ‘Genius has little need of personal experience as the man in the street understands it,’ she declared. Psychology she had studied since her days with Miss Beale, Freud she read in German as soon as The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and the Three Essays on Sexuality were available. Her method, in fact, was clinical. She allowed herself to indicate whether her characters were acting wisely or unwisely, but her main concern was to show how and why they behaved as they did.

  The cost of this clear-sightedness to a woman writer might, she felt, be very great. In The Creators (1910) a woman novelist insists that virginity means a concentration of power which can be expended in art. ‘Genius is giving you another sex inside you, and a stronger one, to plague you with,’ but this too can be liberated in words. No need to go through marriage or childbirth, the writer is ‘born knowing’. Experience, in fact, is a disadvantage, ‘because it blinds you to everything but your own reactions’.

  Whether or not all this could possibly be true of say, Mary Shelley, or of Ella D’Arcy (whom she had met), May did not discuss. She knew it was true of herself, and passionately believed it was true of the Brontës. They were self-sufficient, needing nothing outside the walls of Haworth Parsonage. When four of Charlotte Brontë’s letters to M. Héger were printed in The Times (July 29, 1913) May felt them as a heavy personal blow. Like every other novelist who writes on the novel, her message had been: do it as I do it. This single vision admitted no qualification. Still, it could be misunderstood, and Charlotte Mew d
id misunderstand it. She was a totally different kind of writer, more different than she could possibly have guessed, registering only what corresponded to her own acute inner tension, while May looked outward, with a kind of keen placidity, to observe what she called ‘the psychological mystery of human behaviour’.

  Charlotte didn’t want to be introduced to May Sinclair. She was never anxious to be introduced to anyone if it meant being produced as some kind of discovery, and she was quite genuinely afraid of May’s reputation as a brilliant and highly educated woman, busy at the moment on her Defence of Idealism. What was more, Charlotte had particularly disliked what she had written about Emily Brontë in The Three Brontës (1912). May had interpreted Emily (from Wuthering Heights) as mentally and physically ‘virile’, and (from inquiries at Haworth) said that she had tramped the moors ‘with the form and step of a virile adolescent’. Charlotte, as we have seen, profoundly believed that Emily was not like herself, but was above and apart from sexuality. The Combined Maze, however, which appeared in February 1913, was a different matter altogether, and by this latest novel of May’s Charlotte felt stunned. ‘It has completely got and kept hold of me – by what it is,’ she told Sappho.

  The Combined Maze is a psychological novel whose symbolism is drawn, rather unexpectedly, from the mixed gymnastics class at the Marylebone Polytechnic. May attended the institute evening after evening to get the details right. As it happened, she was, in spite of her demure roly-poly appearance, an excellent runner and jumper, and had even been taught by her brothers to be a good footballer. From an expert’s point of view, then, she watched the Polytechnic’s show piece, a combined formation march for both sexes, and saw it as an image of the wheel of life. In her novel the tramp of the approaching P.T. students is ‘an unheard measure, secret and restrained, the murmur of life in the blood, the rhythm of the soundless will’. The elaborate exercise is a form of interpenetration,