Charlotte Mew

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Between Charlotte and May, however, there was no definite break. Indeed, after she got back from Belgium, it was May who seemed unwilling to let go. She went on sending affectionate notes, asking Charlotte to meet useful people, and to walk round the streets of London, now darkened against a possible Zeppelin raid. On 9 June 1915 she wrote Charlotte a long letter about the Imagist poets Pound, Flint, Aldington and Hilda Doolittle. She had two points to make – first, what would the imagists do if the presentation of a concentrated moment, without comment, wasn’t sufficient to ‘carry’ or express the strength of their emotions? ‘Poets shouldn’t be ridiculed, however, for doing something else,’ she went on. ‘You don’t despise Meleager because he isn’t Sappho, although if you had to choose between them, you know which you would let go.’ Secondly, had the Imagists strong human emotions to express at all, or was their passion just ‘hair-tearing’? The hearts and souls of the Imagists, she had come to the conclusion, weren’t strong enough to carry them to ‘great heights and depths.…’ But ‘I know one poet whose breast beats like a dynamo under an iron-grey tailor-made suit (I think one of her suits is iron-grey) and when she publishes her poems she will give me something to say that I cannot and do not say of my Imagists’.

  This letter, meant to be persuasive, strikes one as tactless in the extreme. The reference to Sappho seems unfortunate, but then so too is the reference to Meleager, about whom Charlotte knew nothing. As to the remarks about poor Charlotte’s heart and her grey suit, they are an attempt to strike May’s old sensible, rallying tone, but without success.

  Dame Rebecca West told me that May (whom she had known as a young woman) managed to persuade herself that Charlotte’s passion was nothing but Schwärmerei, an inconvenience. ‘You wouldn’t like it if it happened to you.’ Another viewpoint comes from the American poet Virginia Moore, who interviewed May at the end of the 1920s, when she was over in England working on a study of the Brontës. In her book, when it was eventually published, Virginia Moore noted that May had described Emily, in The Three Brontës, as having ‘the form and step of a virile adolescent’, and she added a footnote on Charlotte Mew. ‘Her voice, manner, taste in clothes, walk and physical appearance, though she was small and delicate, hinted faintly of masculinity. She could not change. She did not know what to do about the instincts in her. She was half-appalled, half-loyal to them.’ If this represents May’s final judgement, it is a more thoughtful one. After that blankness descends, for in the 1930s May Sinclair entered a long mental twilight during which she could neither recognize nor care about any other human being, except her housekeeper.

  In 1915, however, she was generous enough to tell Charlotte that if only her income hadn’t been down to bedrock (largely through supporting the ambulance unit) she would have liked to publish The Farmer’s Bride and all the other poems herself. Fortunately, Charlotte was soon to come across a publisher, and at the same time a place, where she could venture to feel welcome without being altogether ridiculous. This place was the Poetry Bookshop.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Poetry Bookshop

  THE POETRY BOOKSHOP (in its first premises) existed from 1913 to 1926. It was in a squalid bit of Bloomsbury, full of small workshops, dustbins and cats – 35 Devonshire Street (now Boswell Street). It opened from 11 a.m. to 6.30 p.m., never had many paying customers at any time, and, right from the start, was usually in financial difficulties. But it was there, and even the fact that it was there was of real importance.

  The shop itself was on the ground floor of a dilapidated eighteenth-century house, with only one cold-water tap for the whole building. However, as you came through the swing door you felt the warmth of a coal fire burning at the other end of the room. There was a dog stretched out there and a cat, which sometimes sprang about the shelves, apparently deliberately, knocking down piles of books. The furniture had been made by the Fabian master-carpenter Romney Green, and was exceptionally solid, the curtains were of sacking, and there were cushions in ‘jolly’ colours. Across the walls rhyme sheets were displayed in rows, a penny plain, twopence coloured, and bought mostly for children. A whole generation learned to love poetry from these rhyme sheets. On the table by the fire were the shop’s latest publications, for anyone to sit down and read. Everything was for anyone to sit down and read. The stock included all the poetry in print by every living English poet, and living poets were there themselves, particularly if they were young and poor. It was the first place they made for when they got to London, and if they had nowhere to live there were rooms for them in the attics, at a very low rent. Robert Frost brought the whole of his family there in 1913, Wilfred Owen was squeezed out, but given a room over the coffee shop opposite, Wilfrid Gibson lived in a kind of cupboard, marked ‘in case of fire, access to the roof is through this room’. ‘They have underneath the house a shop where they sell poetry by the pound,’ according to the sculptor Gaudier-Brzěska, ‘and talk to the intellectuals.’ In a small office on the first floor, in front of a heavy Barlock typewriter, sat a conventional-looking business man with a dark moustache and a diffident smile. This was Harold Monro, the proprietor, harassed, but easily persuaded to come out and give advice, with his sudden warm smile, to the customers.

  The Poetry Bookshop in 1913.

  Monro was the awkward product of a new century’s gospel of Joy, Hope, Freedom and Simplicity at work on a dour, practical Scot who drew a reasonable income from his family’s private lunatic asylum. Some business caution he always retained, but the romantic idealist in him had made him waver, until he was nearly thirty-five, between the choices in life. In 1908, for example, he had been training himself to join the Samurai, a society vowed to clean living, vegetarian diet, exercise, and meditation ‘with the object of evolving a higher human type’. His diary (not for the only time) recorded nightmares. He dreamed that he was a corpse watching the worms eating him, or that he was falling down the inside of a narrow tower lined with bookshelves, which he clutched at for support. In another dream John Galsworthy was eating an enormous beef steak which covered the whole table – ‘finally he chases and belabours me with it’. This mixture of the ideal, the sinister and the grotesque was to haunt Harold Monro to the end of his life.

  But although he tried various occupations, nothing mattered more to him than poetry. He was addicted to poetry as others are addicted to drink – indeed, as Monro himself was addicted to drink, for he found life a tormenting business. ‘I can’t learn to know men,’ he wrote,

  ‘or conceal

  How strange they are to me.’

  ‘He was slow to react,’ according to C. H. Sisson, ‘for the best reasons, because he was all the time trying to eject something which lay at the bottom of his mind.’ But at length, in 1911, he arrived back from his European travels to England and devoted himself to ‘doing something about poetry’. No groups, no cliques, nothing doctrinaire, but a meeting-place (he called it a ‘depôt’) for poets of all persuasions, and every kind of reader. He would publish, too, but at the ‘depôt’ poetry must be heard read aloud, because to him a book was a printed score, brought alive only by the human voice. It was a brave ambition for a shy and only moderately well-off man. (Even the unsavoury Devonshire Street had been partly chosen in the hope that the poor would come into the shop and read; they didn’t, however, but looked on him as a source of free drinks after hours.) Going about the affair with Scottish good sense and competence, he acquired his own magazine, and found small firms who could print up to his standard. In September 1912 he was asked by Eddie Marsh to publish the first volume of Georgian Poetry.

  Marsh was Winston Churchill’s private secretary, a generous patron of modern painting, and, in an innocent way, of young men, who eventually led him towards poetry. With Rupert Brooke and Monro (who shared the financial risk) Marsh felt he was making a decisive step forward with his anthology of up-to-date Georgians, the point being that they were not Victorians. Fortunately, in 1912 he could count on a general dispositio
n to read poetry. There were many other circles like Mrs Dawson Scott’s, and beyond this it was the great time for small, thin-paper, verse anthologies, with a ribbon for a bookmark, which went easily into the side-pocket, and were taken for long tramps in the fresh air, returning with grass and pressed flowers between the pages. The Golden Treasury (1897) was one of the first of these, and there was no sign of their running out. It was true that these little volumes, even when they were by the newer poets, were often not very demanding. John Drinkwater, for example, in Poems of Love and Earth (1912) thanks God for (1) sleep; (2) clear day through the little leaded panes; (3) shining well water; (4) warm golden light; (5) rain and wind (apparently at the same time as (2)); (6) swallows; (7) wallflowers, tulips, primroses and ‘crowded orchard boughs’; (8) good bread; (9) honey-comb; (10) brown-shelled eggs; (11) kind-faced women with shapely mothering arms; (12) tall strong-thewed young men; (13) an old man bent above his scythe; (14) the great glad earth and ‘Heaven’s trackless ways’. There was a great deal of this kind of thing at the lower and easier end of the repertoire, where eggs were always brown, the women always kind, and the earth always glad. But the poetry was meant to give pleasure and it was, after all, the last body of English poetry to be actually read, by ordinary people, for pleasure.

  To this easy-going public Marsh now wanted to introduce his new voices – Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare, Ralph Hodgson, W. H. Davies, D. H. Lawrence. There was no question of any women poets, and it was not until his third volume that Marsh ever enquired as to whether there were any. Monro told him that if the voices were to be new they must include Ezra Pound. But Pound refused permission to include his early poem on Christ, The Goodly Fere, because he was reprinting it himself. No Pound, then, but this did not disturb Marsh, who thought of him as a wild creature, an outsider rampaging through Kensington. The grand old man, to whom all looked up, was Thomas Hardy, who was known to be suspicious of the Georgians, but might be won over. Neither Marsh nor even Monro realized how soon English poetry was going to be taken over by powerful aliens.

  Meanwhile they printed 5,000 copies of Georgian Poetry 1911–12 and sold, in the end, 15,000. With only an office boy and a lady secretary to help him at the Bookshop, Monro had more work than he could manage. The office boy was so absent-minded that the kettle, which was a slow boiler, was named after him; then Wilfrid Gibson, the simplest and most delightful of poets, disorganized the business by eloping with the secretary. Still Monro was unwilling to give up any part of the work, least of all the Bookshop. At this point he had the good fortune to meet Alida Klementaski.

  Alida was a beautiful girl from a Hampstead-Polish refugee family, looking for a way to make the world a better place. She was twenty years old, and at the back of her mind (she said) she seemed to hear a voice repeating ‘Life is expecting much of thee.’ She might be a doctor, she thought, or an actress, or a leader in the women’s suffrage movement. She might go out and rescue prostitutes from the street, but at all costs she must not be ‘an encumberer of the ground’. This sounds as though Alida had no sense of humour; she had, but she took serious things seriously.

  She and Harold Monro first met at a poets’ club dinner at the Café Monico on 14 March 1913. The subject was the nineties poet John Davidson (the author of Thirty Bob a Week). The soup was Velouté Shakespeare. Alida, in a borrowed Liberty dress, was the reader, and Harold Monro realized, when he heard her, that there were women, as well as men, for whom poetry was life. His own wife, from whom he was separated, had frowned if the word ‘soul’ was mentioned. Almost immediately Alida found herself a bed-sitter and began to work, at a salary of five pounds a month, in the Bookshop. In a fit of conscience Monro warned her that to ‘join the ranks of the emancipated’ would cause eyebrows to be raised. Alida gloried in the idea. Her energy and devotion were so great that he soon admitted he was ‘at sea’ without her.

  From ‘Dear Miss Klementaski’ she rapidly became ‘Dear Alida’ and then ‘Dear child’. They were deeply in love, but not lovers. Alida felt herself one of the free, and longed to bear his child, or at least to live under the same roof. But Monro could not bring himself to admit to her outright, either then or ever, that he had been homosexual since his school days at Radley. In an attempt to lead up to an explanation he told her that it was possible to love one person for their mind, another for their body, and, once, that he felt he was doing her ‘a great, sad wrong’ which it was impossible to explain. He can be seen as afraid to lose her, and even more afraid to hurt her. Alida was an impressionable, but not a complicated, person. One day for her could be torture, the next joy unspeakable. She had no idea what he was talking about.

  It was no secret, however, to some of the Bookshop’s regulars, who liked Harold, but felt Alida needed consolation. Ralph Hodgson, a pipe-smoking, bull-terrier-fancying poet, not a man of many words, came into the shop one evening and kissed her. ‘I couldn’t help it and couldn’t prevent it,’ she wrote. ‘He knew that and apologized after. It is very curious the terrible repulsion I have to the feel of anyone besides you near me. I don’t suppose that you have it, do you?’ Harold replied, disappointingly, that he could not set up to be a protector of women. But he loved her, he said, as he loved the earth itself, without always remembering it was there.

  To this trust Alida responded with noble loyalty. Her great concern was to keep to the ideal of their first friendship, those moments which she thought of as ‘beaten into white heat’. With those in mind, she sustained herself during his frequent absences on lecture tours and hard-working business trips. With the declaration of war in 1914 her responsibilities doubled. At first Monro thought the Bookshop would have to close at once, but in a few weeks it was business as usual. He relied on her to keep him in touch day by day. That was hard enough for a girl who was training herself as she went along, and even harder were some of the letters she had to write. On April 26 1915, for example, she had to break the news to him that Rupert Brooke had died in the Dardanelles. ‘I’m so glad he wasn’t shot, aren’t you?’ she offered as the one consolation.

  On most things, certainly on political principles, they were absolutely agreed. After the war all colonies must be handed back to their inhabitants and all governments must become democracies. No prisons, no slaughterhouses. As to the Bookshop, it must stay open for the duration, as poetry’s shelter. Monro (who had volunteered as a despatch rider and been turned down) refused to make money out of the ‘patriotic anthologies’ which were rushed into print during the first recruiting drive. The most he would do was to end the shop’s poetry readings with a war poem, often Laurence Binyon’s ‘They shall grow not old’.

  These famous Bookshop readings, famous, that is, out of all proportion to the size of the audience, were on Tuesdays and Thursdays. They took place in an attic up a flight of stairs, steep as a ladder, so that Alida sometimes made a note ‘No falls to-night’. In front of the curtain and the softly-shaded light, Monro welcomed all comers with ‘stiff, soldierly little bows’, concealing an agony of nerves. He often had to get drunk afterwards – particularly, for some reason, on Thursdays – and had nightmares of suffocation. He never read his own poems aloud himself, but left this to Alida, who slipped them quietly into the programme on the ‘twentieth-century’ evenings. For one of these, in the late autumn of 1915, she arranged to read from Monro, John Masefield, James Joyce, Eleanor Farjeon, D. H. Lawrence and Charlotte Mew.

  Alida, like Mrs Dawson Scott, had read The Farmer’s Bride in 1912, and had not forgotten it. No-one seemed to know Charlotte Mew’s address, but Monro suggested that they might get it through The Nation. Alida, who by this time had undertaken most of the secretarial work for the shop, accordingly wrote off, and asked if there were any more poems to be got together to make a small book. A reply arrived from Charlotte, thanking Miss Klementaski, but pointing out that if her poems were published, nobody would want to read them. Enclosed, however, was a copy of The Changeling.

  Both The Changeling and T
he Farmer’s Bride were in the programme for a Tuesday in November 1915. Alida had written once again to 9 Gordon Street, asking the author whether she wouldn’t like to come and hear her verses read aloud? There was, of course, no way of knowing what this newcomer would look like. About twelve or fifteen people used to drop in on the modern poetry evenings, most of them young, some of them in uniform. At about five minutes to six the swing door opened and out of the autumn fog came a tiny figure, apparently a maiden aunt, dressed in a hard felt hat and a small-sized man’s overcoat. She was asked, ‘Are you Charlotte Mew?’ and replied, with a slight smile, ‘I am sorry to say I am.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Alida

  CHARLOTTE was telling neither less nor more than the truth. Her confidence was at its very lowest. Although in the autumn of 1915 May Sinclair continued to press cheerful invitations and offers of help upon her, she could only see these as the long-drawn-out end of a miserable mistake. The poem she had sent to the Bookshop, The Changeling, was not associated with May or May’s enthusiasm. It had been written before Charlotte met her.

  The Changeling (‘I shall grow up, but never grow old’) was not readily suited to Alida’s voice, which was a rich young contralto. Charlotte might have had mixed feelings at hearing a reading by someone else of this poem, with which she had disturbed Sappho and beguiled Sappho’s children. But she liked Alida’s interpretation, comparing it later to the wind, which changes the colour of the cornfields as it passes across them.

  When Alida sat down thirteen years later to describe what she remembered of this first encounter, she found it very difficult. To begin with, there was Charlotte’s oddness. Fashions had changed during the first year of war, and Charlotte’s long coat, red knitted stockings and clutched umbrella looked much more old-fashioned than they would have done even a year earlier. She had ‘quantities of white hair’. This is the first time we hear of Charlotte’s hair having turned white, and evidently she no longer looked much younger than her age. When introductions were made she had a defensive air, anticipating an enemy. ‘She did not have any illusions about herself,’ Alida wrote, ‘and what people might think of her when they first met her and heard her speak in her rather strident voice and her méfiant manner.’ Knowing what people might think made her talk not less stridently, but more so. This, too, was a habit of maiden aunts. It was called ‘bristling’.