The old rule, on which the Mews had been brought up, was one-tenth of your income on charity, one-eighth on rent. By these standards, and indeed by any standards, Delancey Street was ludicrously more than they could afford, and it seems puzzling that they did not surrender the lease at once. But that would have meant the nightmare of moving house twice in one year, and of losing the ‘good address’ which, whatever their lamentations, meant almost as much to them as it had to Ma. Of course they would have to go soon, and of course in no circumstances must they think of selling the Brighton property. To break into their small capital, the capital which was always felt to stand between the unmarried woman and the workhouse, would have been a sacrilege. The truth was that they could not think what to do. They were worn out, both of them. Anne went to Hampstead, Charlotte first to the Olivers, and then to Cambridge. On the 21st of July Sydney recorded: ‘Charlotte Mew for the weekend. After tea I took her to the Botanic Garden and we sat on the grass looking at the waterlilies.’
‘Wednesday 25th of July 1923. Dull, much rain … to Downing Street, to the Prime Minister’s secretary, E. P. Gower, about a Civil List pension for Charlotte Mew. Had a very satisfactory interview with him.’ It was one of Sydney’s happiest ideas, a little arrangement to fix up which should please everyone, including himself.
Cockerell knew the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, who was the nephew of his old friend, the painter Edward Burne-Jones. But these matters were never entirely straightforward, (otherwise they would not have appealed to Sydney). The position had been well put, twenty years earlier, by W. B. Yeats. ‘The difficulty in these cases is that they are, I think, always given for a combination of worth and need.… Tennyson’s pension, for instance, was given when the alternative was probably his doing some kind of pot-boiling – Pensions like this are an exception, the majority are probably given because of real want.’ So far, so good – the Mews, even when they could bring themselves to leave Delancey Street, would be in real want. But there were, as Cockerell knew well, other possible difficulties. Richard Jefferies had refused to take money from the Royal Literary Fund because he believed the fund was maintained by ‘dukes and duchesses’. A Civil List pension had been arranged for the always penniless poet Lascelles Abercrombie in 1914, but there had been a terrible outcry because he wasn’t doing war-work; he had to be persuaded into a munitions factory. Then there were the writer’s sponsors – three were needed, and their voices must carry authority. Cockerell had started by having a word with one of his rivals in the art of fixing, Edmund Gosse. Gosse, as Librarian of the House of Lords and a ‘man of letters’, of the kind which no longer exists, would have counted very high, but he refused. He said, without explaining what he meant, that he had some reservations as to the quality of Charlotte Mew’s work. Recovering from the check, Sydney had approached three poets, Thomas Hardy, John Masefield and Walter de la Mare. Masefield, always kind and always anxious to do the right thing, undertook to write the application. Hardy could be relied upon, and de la Mare also agreed; either he had changed his opinion of The Farmer’s Bride, or else he concentrated on the question of ‘real want’. He himself had been delivered, in 1908, from his job as a bookkeeper with Anglo-American Standard Oil by a Civil List pension of £100. Indeed, his success as a poet had fulfilled, in real life, the romantic dreams of the thirty-bob-a-weeker.
Knowing Charlotte’s circumstances as well as he did, Sydney suggested asking for £75 p.a., which would increase the sisters’ income by about a third. He himself would not appear in the matter at all, although everyone would know that it was his doing. What pleased him particularly was the magical or Dickensian aspect of the whole transaction, the unlooked-for surprise, for Charlotte had not asked him for anything or dreamed that anything could be done. Of course, while the application was still being arranged he could say nothing, but four days after he had been to the Prime Minister’s Office he felt himself at liberty to call round at the studio and break the joyous news. The reaction was all that he could have wished. Charlotte couldn’t believe that Baldwin would take the suggestion seriously; she hadn’t herself at first – then when she had seen Masefield’s letter she had felt as though she had fallen into deep water and couldn’t get out, without being ungracious to people greater and better than herself. In a curious phrase, she said it made her feel ‘a sort of suicide’.
Some persuasion was still necessary. Charlotte was seized with a kind of scrupulous doubt – she did not believe she was going to write any more poetry. The impulse, she thought, had died at last. Would it be right, in that case, to accept a poet’s pension? Sydney reassured her. He helped her, too, with her letters of acknowledgement, telling her exactly what to say to each of her sponsors, and to the Prime Minister’s secretary, and how to address the envelopes. And Charlotte accepted all this humbly. She had never pretended to be able to spell, and she did not want to let him down.
As Christmas drew near, Sydney proposed a scheme which had long been close to his heart. He wanted – and evidently this was a good time – to introduce Charlotte to Walter de la Mare. The two poets must be his guests one lunch time. He attached great importance to this little party, and one would have thought the best arrangement would have been to confine it to the three of them, but at the last moment he seems to have lost his head and booked a table at the Gobelins for six, inviting three more ladies, Anne Mew, Alida, and Florence Hardy. For Florence it must have been a great treat, since Hardy had been ill and did not like her to go up to London often, if at all, but the party was now somewhat unbalanced. Sydney was probably guarding against Charlotte’s diffidence or even ferocity in the face of anyone new. What he did not know, though of course Alida and Charlotte did, was that de la Mare had not thought The Farmer’s Bride good enough for Georgian Poetry.
Probably (it would have been like her) it was because of this embarrassment that Charlotte was suddenly at her best. Sydney, who was something of an anxious impresario with his two celebrities, was much relieved, and had never seen her ‘more sparkling and at ease’. De la Mare (as he explained in a letter of thanks) had thought Charlotte Mew would be quite different. Whatever he might have expected from the wild confessionals of Madeleine and In Nunhead Cemetery, it could hardly have been this tiny, neat, ironically glancing figure, who looked for all the world like the heroine of his own Memoirs of a Midget. She told stories, he said, which afterwards he could remember perfectly, but couldn’t repeat without losing the essence of them. All this is the more remarkable because de la Mare himself habitually talked without stopping and gently disputed every point (he once argued for two days over whether marmalade could properly be called a kind of jam). But on this occasion he listened, as he listened to music. ‘She just knows humanity,’ he told Cockerell, ‘one of the rarest things in the world.’
At the end of December the formal notification of the pension came through, and even the Mews themselves were not more delighted than Sydney.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Loss of a Sister
1924 AND 1925 were two of the happiest years, certainly the last happy ones, in Charlotte Mew’s life. Although the sales of poetry had dropped considerably since the end of the war, the new edition of The Farmer’s Bride continued, in a modest way, to do well, and her reputation spread. There is a photograph of Charlotte with Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, at his Boar’s Hill house near Oxford. Siegfried Sassoon brought Louis Untermeyer, over from New York, to the studio; he also recommended The Farmer’s Bride to that legendary patroness, Lady Ottoline Morrell, who resolved to collect the new poetess into her circle. Past her great days by this time, Lady Ottoline was preparing to leave Garsington for London, and to inaugurate a new salon where women would be invited as well as men. Like a splendid bird of prey with plumage a little bedraggled, she called once, twice, at the Hogarth Studios without finding anyone at home. Eventually she got her invitation to tea, and talked at length. Afterwards Charlotte wrote to her and sent her a quotation from Conrad
, ‘the passing wind and the stirring leaf hear also’, but resolutely refused to appear in any salon whatsoever. As to Conrad himself, he too had been drawn in by the tireless Sydney. On Christmas Day 1923 the two of them had lunch together, and travelled up to London by train. Not having read any of Conrad’s novels, Sydney tried The Farmer’s Bride on him, and Conrad (admittedly he could hardly have done otherwise) replied, with continental politeness, that he greatly admired Miss Mew.
She was still cautious, guarding herself against photographers, and suspicious of anthologists, perhaps unduly so. Poor Harold Monro was disconcerted when she refused to allow anything of hers into Macmillan’s Golden Treasury of Modern Lyrics. After all, he reminded her, she had given permission, or seemed to, when he came to tea at the studio, and Anne had been there and had been delighted at the idea of one of her sister’s poems ‘in a standard work’. This is the authentic Anne, gently conciliating, proud of Charlotte’s success, hoping to make her difficult life easier.
Charlotte, however, had no objection when Alida broadcast Sea Love from the BBC’s Savoy Hill studio – radio was one of the new wonders, she said, for which no doubt we shall all be much better and wiser. Altogether she regarded the 1920s as a source of dry amusement, but largely on account of their music and their art. It cannot be said that she was politically minded. She never even registered for the vote, and probably the only reference she ever made to the country’s problems was in a letter to Sassoon, when she quoted from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses:
If I could find a higher tree
How much, much farther I could see
and suggested that this might be good advice for politicians. This does not mean that she did not understand what some of these problems were. She never forgot the afternoon in 1913 when she had broken into an old people’s home and found an old woman upstairs, alone, and too weak to make herself tea or to write a postcard. She knew the face of sickness and poverty, just as she knew that she herself was, by nature, one of society’s outsiders. But she could not see where the solution lay, and when Sassoon told her that perhaps civilization itself depended upon poetry, she could only tell him that if that were really true, poetry, like politics, would have to shift its load up higher.
The Civil List pension brought her an advantage, which can only be truly appreciated by those who have been greatly troubled, and greatly helped. Now that her daily life was a little easier, she was able to exercise her old art of stimulating or consoling (no matter which) any of her friends who needed her. Kate Cockerell always did. ‘Dear Charlotte – Do come and stay with us,’ she wrote in her eager, untidy scrawl, very unlike Sydney’s neat hand, ‘it is such a Chance.’ Florence was also in deep distress, this time over Hardy’s infatuation with a young amateur actress who was appearing in a local production of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. This tiresome obsession over-shadowed the Max Gate household, and Charlotte offered poor Florence her own remedies for ‘nerves’; best to try and make something with your hands, or to design something, or to look at the trees and the sky and remember ‘that they are not for any of us for ever – [that] pulls one up’. Certainly these were not very original suggestions, but originality was not what Florence wanted – she needed to feel understood, and by a poet. When the Hardy Players brought their production to London, Charlotte went with her to the chaotic rehearsals, and when in 1924 Florence had to be admitted to a nursing-home in Fitzroy Square, Charlotte visited her there. It was an operation to remove a swollen gland from the neck. On one occasion Charlotte called at the same time as Virginia Woolf. They confronted each other at Florence’s bedside, but unfortunately both of them were too shy to speak.
In May 1925, when Florence was facing the ‘exhausting birthday week’ which she always feared would be too much for Hardy, she particularly wrote to thank Charlotte for her thoughtfulness. Every other visitor to Max Gate had the idea that ‘others may tire him, but not me’, and only the day before, when a very talkative lady had called, Hardy had left the room abruptly and had been found collapsed on a sofa. Sydney Cockerell had become a great offender. As Florence acidly put it, ‘I think it is a pity he pursues people so ardently, as it seems to be wearing him out.’ Charlotte knew that this was not so, and that Sydney drew new energy from the chase. But she herself was quite content to wait till the autumn to go down again to Max Gate. Part of the very hot summer of 1925 she spent with Alida in one of her long series of country cottages, this particular one near Rye, in Sussex. All of them had earth closets and well-water, and had to be adapted to the needs of six dogs and a cat. Harold Monro, meanwhile, was often abroad, seeking cures for what Alida called ‘the enemy’ though she also felt that the continent, where wine was sixpence a bottle, was ‘not the place to fight such a battle’. Monro had been deeply depressed by the patriotic glitter of the 1924 Wembley Empire Exhibition; in one of his satiric dream poems he envisaged an exhibition of the future, where the last Georgian Nature Poet would be on show, dressed in tweed and sipping beer, in a specially designed case. The Bookshop, he knew, was near bankruptcy, and Alida had pathetically asked him whether she would have to sell her dogs. Responsible as he was for her future, Monro did not dare to risk much more of his money in the business. He saw himself and Alida as two helpless creatures, with nothing left but determination to come out of the other side of the tunnel.
Charlotte had told Sydney that she would write no more poems, but this had been when she was still recovering from the shock of her mother’s death, and in what Edith Oliver called ‘one of her fits of the blues’. Alida certainly hoped for another collection. The Bookshop must publish what it believed in, even if, to meet the printing costs, she had to let her own bedroom or, worse still, ‘open a criticism bureau’. It was probably at this time that Charlotte showed her some of the other things she had written and put away, or published but not reprinted in The Farmer’s Bride. She also gave to Sydney the present he wanted most of all – indeed he told her that he ‘prized’ and ‘hugged’ it – the manuscript of a poem. She often wrote out verses that people particularly liked, so that they could have a copy of their own, but this was a different matter – it was an original draft of Requiescat. Looking at it made Sydney feel, he said, a fraud or an impostor, someone who could only give advice, but could create nothing himself. In his opinion Requiescat (which was not included in The Farmer’s Bride) should be reprinted. He never, of course, had any suspicion of the perverse element in Charlotte which might suppress this poem simply because Ella had liked it.
For Christmas 1925 Lady Ottoline sent a copy of Emily Brontë’s poems, a well-chosen present, although Charlotte had one already. She marvelled at how many friends her own small book seemed to have brought her. Just at the time when Alida was seized with a sudden fear she was reaching ‘the dangerous age’, Charlotte, for her part, emerged for a short while into a kind of humorous serenity. It can be felt in a letter she wrote to Dorothy Hawksley in April 1926, agreeing that Shakespeare’s plays, which they both loved ‘can’t possibly have been written by a literary person’. But she refused to dispute about Queen Elizabeth’s virginity. ‘If we deny that, we’ll soon be hearing that Victoria wasn’t a widow.’ She was on the easiest possible terms with Dorothy, a talented artist and a kind, practical woman whom Kate Cockerell had decided must be the one, when everything was over, to look after Sydney. Charlotte, who had done her best to resist for years both painters and photographers, agreed to sit to Dorothy, who made in 1926 the sensitive pen-and-wash drawing which is now in the National Portrait Gallery. In this, Charlotte looks melancholy, but not as though life had no compensations.
In May 1926 the General Strike made any kind of visiting difficult. Alida (though in sympathy with the miners) flew to extremes, thinking it might be ‘the end of everything’ and it would be best if as many of her friends as possible moved down to her cottage, where they could live on vegetables and home produce till the crisis was past. Meanwhile she had to look for new premise
s for the Bookshop, since the Devonshire Street lease was almost up. With so much in hand she was beginning to find housework intolerable. Polygamy, she had told Charlotte, would be a better solution, with extra wives to share the work. But there would always be an odd one out whom the husband preferred, Charlotte told her, and if that one tried to share the profits there’d be a strike.
It is hard to say exactly when Charlotte began, not to worry, but to worry seriously about Anne. Ever since Ma died, Anne had not liked being left alone at night, but this could have been no more than the dependence of someone who was always very much the younger sister. In the December of 1925 she had felt too ill to come with Sydney and Charlotte to Noel Coward’s Hay Fever, but after that she had made a good recovery, and had begun to paint again. In the spring of 1926 she had submitted three pictures to the Academy for the Easter show, but they were rejected, and the sisters had made up their minds not to go to Varnishing Day, until they remembered that Dorothy, who was on some Academy committee or other, might be there. In the summer they were both reading Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which they decided to recommend to Sydney. Then, in the autumn, Anne began to feel pain which the doctor could not account for, and Charlotte felt a pang of fear, which took the form of sudden decision. To everyone brought up as a Victorian, a ‘change of air’ was the great remedy. 86 Delancey Street, which had always been a ridiculous extravagance, must be given up, and Anne must be taken away out of London to the country to breathe fresh air and escape the winter fogs. Charlotte decided on Chichester, near the sea and the downs, and began to write off for suitable rooms. One advantage might be visits from Alida. She had rented yet another cottage, this time at Sidlesham, just outside Chichester, and would be able to drive over in her ‘chariot’, a 1924 Jowett which she had won in a newspaper competition (‘Please be excited and glad about it!’ she had begged Harold). All that Anne asked for was somewhere quiet.
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