Charlotte Mew

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  But a letter came to say that Anne was ill from overwork. Charlotte hurried back. She had always thought that Anne should give notice – even if it meant starvation – and, not long afterwards, Anne did. The idea was that from now on she would not go out to work, but give lessons in the studio, though at the moment she had only one pupil, a music-hall singer, magnificent in her hat and sealskin coat but, Charlotte thought, very dirty underneath them.

  May was now installed in St John’s Wood, at 1 Blenheim Road, where there was a courtyard with trees behind the house. But during Charlotte’s absence the doted-upon black cat, Tommy, had died, and May was only just recovering from the shock. She was in a vulnerable, affectionate mood. Charlotte opened cautiously by asking her to tea; Sappho would also be there. ‘I’d ever so much rather see you by yourself (though I like Mrs Dawson Scott very much)’ May replied, and a week later, calling her ‘My dear’, she begged her to come to supper with Evelyn Underhill and the Richard Aldingtons. No. 1 Blenheim Road, she added, would be ‘honoured and blessed’ by Charlotte’s crossing the threshold. In the few weeks since the two of them had met again a curious situation had developed, a tenseness where the smallest misunderstanding might be a declaration of love or war.

  Not by way of an answer [May wrote on 14 May] but as a general statement, may I assure you that I really have not a complicated mind, but in some ways rather a simple one, and when I say ‘I want to walk with you to Baker Street Station’, I mean to walk, and I want to walk with you, and I want to walk to Baker Street Station. The act of walking is a pleasure in itself, that has no ulterior purpose or significance.

  Better to take things simply and never go back on them, or analyse them, is not it?

  I (who am so complicated) took it all quite simply and was glad of it – of you being here, of you talking to me – well, why can’t you do the same?

  May Sinclair had, apparently, no idea why Charlotte could not do the same, and after several more meetings asked Charlotte to come and read whatever it was she had been writing. Charlotte read the first verse of Madeleine in Church ‘so furiously well’ that May said she wouldn’t dare give her anything of her own afterwards, as it would sound totally dead. ‘Finish – finish your courtisan, she’s magnificent. The last verses are all there – coiled up in a lobe of your brain asleep and waiting to be waked, like Tommy in his basket.’ And Charlotte did finish it. Madeleine, in the published version, drops her defiance and remembers her childhood, when she lay awake at night, unable to bear the thought of the Crucifixion. ‘When I was small I never quite believed he was dead.’ And yet she could have borne the pain if Christ had seemed, even for one moment, to notice her.

  At this point in the summer Charlotte herself was thinking of writing a novel (though Mrs Dawson Scott was emphatically against it) – ‘in Russia they are producing the very short and impressionistic variety just now’. She was also reading Conrad’s Chance, taking it very slowly so as to make it last as long as possible.

  In Chance she marked a passage on page 193, where Mar-low, Conrad’s self-questioning narrator, discusses whether it makes sense to confess.

  Never confess! never! never – a confession of whatever sort is always untimely. The only thing which makes it supportable for a while is curiosity. You smile? Ah, but it is so, or else people would be sent to the rightabout at the second sentence. How many sympathetic souls can you reckon on in the world? One in ten, one in a hundred – in a thousand – in ten thousand? … For a confession, whatever it may be, stirs the secret depths of the hearer’s character. Often depths that he himself is but dimly aware of.

  If Charlotte could have had her time over again, she would not have confessed what she felt to May Sinclair. But at the end of June a feverish gaiety seemed to have taken hold of May. She wanted to talk French with Charlotte, and to discuss Verlaine. Then it came out that she had written a poem in French herself, which she wanted read through and corrected. The subject was La Morte (the Dead Woman).

  Qu’avez-vous fait de vos beaux jours, ma chère,

  Les jours qui sont passés,

  Et de vos joies, les âpres, les amères,

  Qu’avez-vous fait?

  Du petit corps, si tendre, si frîleux,

  Des bras qui se tordaient,

  Du petit coeur malin et les yeux

  Qui ont tant pleurés?

  De l’âme sauvage, qui se tourne et se brise

  (Ma pauvre bien-aimée!)

  De la petite âme fuyante, fragile, exquise –

  Qu’avez-vous fait?

  O mon enfant, tout ce que tu as souffert

  Tu ne saurais jamais –

  Et moi, je ne donnerais mon enfer

  D’être ce que tu es.

  My dear, what have you done with the best days of your life,

  the days which are past and gone, and what have you done

  with your harsh and bitter joys?

  (What have you done) with your little body, so tender, so

  sensitive to the cold, your writhing arms, your wicked

  little heart, and those eyes which shed so many tears?

  What have you done with that wild soul, which is twisting

  and breaking itself, my poor beloved, that little, fleeting,

  fragile, exquisite soul?

  Oh my child, you will never understand how much you have

  suffered, and as for me, I wouldn’t give up my share of hell

  to be what you are now.

  May Sinclair was a strange woman. There is no accounting for the warmth, even the extravagance of her letters and the demureness of her actual presence. Very probably it was writing this odd and morbid poem in itself that excited her. ‘Wicked little heart’ (and ‘wicked little smile’) were phrases used often, though always affectionately, about Charlotte. We have to take it that May didn’t intend, or not seriously, any personal reference to the little body and the self-tormenting soul. But it is understandable that Charlotte thought that she did.

  ‘Charlotte has been bothering and annoying May,’ Sappho entered in her diary at the beginning of July. ‘Charlotte is evidently a pervert.’ ‘Are all geniuses perverts?’ she added, in bewildered indignation. She recalled Ella D’Arcy’s reputation with men. She could not understand it. She could not come to terms with it. May had asked her to tea ‘so that we can talk’, and told her what had happened.

  It seems rather unlucky – but Charlotte was hardly ever lucky – that this incident, like Shelley’s first wedding and Swinburne’s decline, has only been recorded in terms of farce. Rebecca West sent to May Sinclair’s biographer, Dr Theophilus Boll, a copy of a letter from the novelist G. B. Stern (‘Peter’). The letter recalled, at a distance of time, how May had told both of them ‘in her neat, precise little voice’ that ‘a lesbian poetess, Charlotte M., had chased her upstairs into the bedroom – “And I assure you, Peter, and I assure you, Rebecca, I had to leap the bed five times!”’ And Dr Boll, a most painstaking American academic, was left to calculate, as he tells us, whether May, at the age of fifty-one, would really have been able to do all this leaping, and if she did, how she could have managed after the fifth leap, which would have trapped her against the wall. I am not sure how Dr Boll could tell whether, in the summer of 1914, May’s bed was against the wall or not. What is certain is that there was an uncontrolled physical confession of furious longing, desiring and touching which terrified May, and perhaps also terrified Miss Lotti.

  ‘My mother told me the detailed story,’ wrote Marjorie Dawson Scott (Mrs Marjorie Watts), ‘when I was about 17 and asked why we never saw Charlotte. She also recorded in her journal that when she and that attractive gossip and novelist, Netta Syrett, were discussing Margaret Radclyffe Hall and Una, Lady Troubridge, with May, the latter said: “I don’t believe what is said of them is true,” to which Netta replied: “I believe it, but I don’t mind.” And May countered this with: “You wouldn’t like it if it happened to you. It did happen to me, but I said, ‘My good woman,
you are simply wasting your perfectly good passion.’”’ This phrase of May’s is the final insult to Charlotte’s love, the nursery phrase, recalling from childhood the ‘perfectly good’ knickers that can be worn again, and the ‘perfectly good’ bread and butter that someone else would be grateful for. It was as though Elizabeth Goodman was watching still.

  What could Charlotte possibly have hoped for? A physical response certainly, but even so she and May could never have lived together as loving friends. Even if May was free of family ties, Charlotte decidedly was not. Whatever happened she must lose (this, of course, is the moment for taking risks). She didn’t want, and for Anne’s sake couldn’t afford, to leave the society of ‘five o’clock people’. Hans Andersen, another homoerotic writer, told children (among others) that his Little Mermaid did not suffer and die because she wanted to leave the human community, but because she wanted to join it at any cost. Charlotte, the unwilling outsider, was left with a deep capacity for love, even a vocation, but May had pitied it with even less understanding than Ella D’Arcy.

  Letter from Charlotte Mew to Mrs Dawson Scott, 24 June 1917. ‘People are only “disappointing” when one makes a wrong diagnosis …’

  ‘Blindest of all the things that I have cared for very much In the whole gay, unbearable, amazing show.’ Was it necessary for May Sinclair to tell so many people about it – Charlotte had no way of knowing how many? ‘I don’t think there’s anything quite so deadly as “giving people away”,’ she had told Mrs Dawson Scott a few months earlier, ‘but it never seems they are given away to me – because I think I see beyond their weakness and their poses – “we are all stricken men” one way or another – and the only thing I have no mercy for is hardness and deadness.’ She had made herself ‘dam ridiculous’, in her own phrase, and more so than she had ever dreaded. Perhaps she felt that Mrs Sappho, to whom she owed so much, might have made more allowance for her. Something was broken between them that could never be mended. Three years later, when Sappho had founded the first of her writers’ organizations, the Tomorrow Club, she was disappointed because Charlotte refused formally (though not very politely) to come and read to them, in the old way. ‘People are only “disappointing”’, Charlotte wrote in this letter, ‘when one makes a wrong diagnosis.’

  In August 1914 the outbreak of war separated them all. Dr Scott joined the RAMC, Mrs Dawson Scott set to work on plans for a Women’s Defence League, Edith Oliver began training in Queen Alexandra’s Nursing Yeomanry, Evelyn Millard, who had been appearing as Cho-Cho San in Madam Butterfly, switched to a patriotic Queen Elizabeth in Drake at the Coliseum. Charlotte, who was home-bound, and had what was then called ‘no men to give’, extended her visiting to the volunteers’ wives who had for several months no idea when and where to collect their allowance of three shillings a week. Very soon, too, there were the widows of some of the first 32,000 casualties.

  But in the almost unbelievable early anxiety to be in the thick of ‘the show’ May Sinclair seemed to be well ahead of the field. From September to October she was in Belgium with an ambulance team sent out by the Medico-Psychological Unit and working with the Belgian Red Cross. The commandant was Dr Hector Munro, the clinic’s consultant. May acted as secretary and contributed a good deal of the funds. But she was used to organizing things in her own way, and perhaps showed this a little too plainly. The first weeks of inactivity, before the refugees from the German advance arrived, were the worst. ‘I began to feel like a large and useless parcel which the commandant had brought with him in sheer absence of mind.’ A few days later, according to her Journal of Impressions of Belgium, she was ‘coldly and quietly angry’ with the commandant. ‘I don’t quite know what I said to him, but I think I said he ought to be ashamed of himself.’ Even to Dr Boll, her sympathetic biographer, says that ‘she did not subordinate her strongly critical mind to the disciplinary phase of the military machine’. In October Dr Munro asked her to go home and appeal for more funds. While she was in England he sent a message to the War Office, telling them that on no account was Miss Sinclair to be allowed back to Belgium.

  With what disappointment and humiliation we can’t tell, but, with all her energies intact, May came back to St John’s Wood. She had not seen Charlotte since July. The first thing she wrote (before even her Journal of Impressions) was a story for Harper’s which she called The Pinprick. It was a tale of studio life. The male narrator describes an enigmatic figure, a woman artist, May Blissett. Mrs Blissett (she is a widow) gives ‘the illusion of fragility – an exquisite person in spite of her queerness’. He is amazed at ‘the tiny scale of the whole phenomenon’, but thinks of her ‘God forgive me, as malign’. She is shy and touchy and furiously anxious not to be ‘in the way’. Nobody wants her to take the empty studio in the block, but she moves in, and his fiancée, Frances Archdale, explains ‘she’s not like a woman. She was trying to tell you that she wasn’t. She isn’t. She isn’t – really – quite human.’ The reason, Frances thinks, is that May Blissett has been through so much. Her father had gone mad, the family had lost all their money, her baby died. ‘She’s come through it all, my dear. She’s utterly beyond. Immune.’ But one afternoon the strange little woman calls on Frances, who has an old friend in for tea, and doesn’t much want any other visitors. May Blissett, however, stays and stays. It must, they think, be simply her obstinacy and her ‘quand même’. But when at last she takes her leave she goes up to her studio, locks the door, and asphyxiates herself. After all she has suffered, she is driven to despair, in the end, by a ‘pinprick’. She had not been wanted, and she knew it. What they had taken for malignity was loneliness.

  The ‘malignity’ of the tiny woman suggests ‘ton petit coeur malin’, and it can hardly be doubted that The Pinprick is an analysis of Charlotte, which was also intended to set May’s mind at rest. This was her long-tried method. Neither here not anywhere else in her work, however, does she discuss homosexuality, and in 1914 she had very little guidance on the subject, and none at on homosexuality in women, since Freud had declared that their ‘erotic life was still veiled in an impenetrable obscurity’. May Blissett is presented as the victim of a trauma, the result of a series of tragic deaths in the family and sudden poverty. The shock has been suppressed, and the victim seems to be ‘immune’. But in fact there has been no release of the long-buried emotional material, and when she makes a last appeal to be allowed back into normal human contact, and is rejected, she sees no point in living any longer. In Charlotte’s case, there had been an alternative ending. May had overcome the early diffidence and touchiness and ‘talked out’ the sad history – as far as she knew it – of the Mew family. The result, according to Freud’s earlier studies, on which May relied so heavily, would be the transference or investment of love to the doctor or sympathetic friend. This explanation, or what seemed to be explanation, would make Charlotte’s behaviour understandable. This doesn’t mean that May condoned it. Indeed, she differed sharply from both Freud and Jung over the value of repression, considering it good for everyone, and for the writer in particular.

  Charlotte, between 1914 and 1918, wrote a group of poems about shameful exposures and betrayal. Ne Me Tangito (by which I think Charlotte meant Nolle me tangere) is the strangest of the lot; the beloved, who ‘fears her touch’ and tries to hide the ugly doubt ‘behind that hurried puzzled little smile’ turns, in her dream, into a baby at the breast

  The child for which I had not looked or ever cared,

  Of whom, before, I had never dreamed.

  There are free associations here of a frightening kind, and they connect with Saturday Market, which is one of the most successful things Charlotte Mew ever wrote. In this poem a wretched woman has to walk through the open market, hiding her pregnancy or abortion, we can’t tell which, under her ragged shawl – a nightmare experience, while the crowd is ‘grinning from end to end’. This is an image from the Mews’ childhood, the old rough Saturday markets at Newport, which were always forbidden grou
nd. There is, in fact, a ballad-singer’s jaunty air to the poem. The speaker gives the woman her orders, being able to see through all her efforts at concealment. ‘Cover it close’, ‘hasten you home with the laugh behind you’, ‘fasten your door’, ‘take out the red, dead thing’.

  In the white of the moon

  On the flags does it stir again? Well, and no wonder –

  Best make an end of it, bury it soon.

  Lie down, don’t waste too much time crying, kill yourself. The joke of it is that none of this matters, because ‘in Saturday market nobody cares’.

  In Ken and The Farmer’s Bride, however much we pity the outcasts, we have to suppose that the small community rejects them because it must protect itself. In Saturday Market the pressure of the outside world is felt for the first time as entirely cruel and hostile. But the poet’s voice is also cruel, offering no hope to the disgraced. The woman who carries and buries the ‘red, dead thing’ is advised to forget the sea, the swallows and the trees. Nature doesn’t want her either, there is no refuge there.