A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Even Ann Thwaite, the most thoroughgoing of researchers, can’t tell exactly how it was that the crisis was resolved. They were married on 13 June 1850, at Shiplake-on-Thames. Tennyson said, in apparent surprise, that it was the nicest wedding he had ever been at.

  Now Emily embarked on her profession, which was primarily a defensive campaign on many fronts. Tennyson had to be protected against distress of body and mind—against noise and disturbance, against the servant situation (which Georgie Burne-Jones, herself an expert campaigner, described as ‘a bloody feud or a hellish compact’), against visitors, sightseers, vexatious relatives, against a monstrous daily post (every amateur poet in the country sent their verses for his opinion), against contemptible hostile criticism and a writer’s own self-doubt and self-reproach. He seems to have managed up till then without her, largely by moving about. Indeed, even after his marriage, the Tennysons moved often, and for years Emily had two houses to run, Farringford at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight and Aldworth, near Haslemere, where they went in summer to avoid the holiday-makers. Ann Thwaite’s book is long, but her painstaking method is the only way to give an idea of Emily’s immensely troublesome, immensely rewarding daily life. Almost everything that could go wrong with the two houses did, including that traditional enemy, the drains. In 1856, for example, Emily was weeding potatoes, binding Alfred’s manuscripts, and planning a new dairy: she paid the bills and subscriptions, kept the accounts…found tenants…organized and supervised builders. She became deeply involved with the Farringford farm when they took it over in 1861. Emily would often consult Alfred—about the rent they should ask for the chalkpit, for instance—but he would say, ‘I must leave it in thy hands to manage.’

  In 1865, Queen Emma of the Sandwich Islands arrives with her Hawaiian entourage. The children’s rooms are needed for the royal party, and they are crammed into the lodge, while Emily’s cousin and aunt, who are staying ‘indefinitely,’ are stowed away elsewhere. Later, Dr James Acworth arrives; his wife is a spiritualist medium and ‘in A’s study,’ Emily’s diary records, ‘a table heaves like the sea.’ In 1871, there is a full house at Aldworth, but Mrs Gladstone is told to come and bring as many of the family as possible. ‘We have room, both in house and heart.’ Some guests have to be encouraged, some consoled. Tennyson, although a generous host, is unpredictable. In 1859, Edward Lear, a favourite guest, is so rudely treated that he goes upstairs to pack; Emily soothes him and buys one of his drawings. Meantime, her two sons, Hallam and Lionel, are brought up from golden-haired darlings, encouraged to walk on the dinner table, to become unrebellious, affectionate, quite dull young men.

  Thwaite gives them almost as much importance in her biography as they must have had in their own family. She is following, she says, Christopher Ricks’s advice to her—‘Parents are formed by their children as well as children formed by their parents.’ But did Emily ever change? Some personal difficulties she solved simply by letting them be—the poet’s dirty shirts, for example, his dark muttering or bellows of complaint after dinner, his skirmishes with pretty women visitors and his compulsion to wander. ‘I trust Saturday will indeed bring thee back, but do not come if there is anything for which thou wouldst wish to stay,’ she writes in 1859.

  These indulgences irritated friends of long standing who saw Emily as a kind of saint, certainly much better than Alfred deserved. ‘Do not throw away your life,’ Jowett wrote to her. He thought ‘there was hardly enough of self in her to keep herself alive.’ Lear (half envious of the closeness of marriage, half repelled by it) wrote in his diary that ‘no other woman in all this world could live with [A. T.] for more than a month.’ They were mistaken, however, if they thought Tennyson was ungrateful. He knew very well that he was blessed, and would, he said, have worked as a stonebreaker to be allowed to marry her earlier. ‘If she were not one of the sweetest, justest natures in the world, I should be almost at my wits’ end.’ And the two of them faced together the death of two children—their first son, who was stillborn, and Lionel, who died at sea in 1885 on the passage home from India.

  The usual image of Emily Tennyson is that of one more sickly Victorian woman, ruling from her sofa. (That, certainly, was how Virginia Woolf represented her in her play Freshwater.) From early childhood she had been considered a weak creature and as a married woman she was often in too much pain to walk, and yet, as Thwaite points out, when her sons were little she writes of climbing ladders, scrambling over rocks, and getting down the Alum Bay cliffs with her feet in eel-baskets. It was not until Hallam and Lionel were students that she had some kind of serious collapse. But nineteenth-century ailments defeat twentieth-century biographers. Reducing sufferers to a wreck, pain was accepted as a lifetime companion. Patience was prayed for, a cure was hardly expected. It’s a relief to know that Emily was a great believer in champagne, and brandy in her bedtime arrowroot.

  After five years of research, Thwaite asks herself and the reader: was Emily Sellwood’s life (as Jowett put it) ‘effaced’? After she left school to become an angel in the house, she educated herself, like so many spirited Victorian daughters, by reading. (My own step-grandmother entered in her diary on her wedding-day: ‘Finished Antigone; Married Bishop.’)

  Emily read Dante, Goethe, Schiller, science, and theology, as Thwaite says, ‘as though in preparation for eternity.’ When she was introduced to Queen Victoria, they talked ‘of Huxley, of the stars, of the millennium, of Jowett.’ Did she squander her intelligence, or worse still, did she wear herself out for nothing? Mrs Gilchrist (the widow of Blake’s first biographer) told William Rossetti that she believed that Emily did positive harm, when ‘watching him with anxious, affectionate solicitude, she surrounds him ever closer and closer with the sultry, perfumed atmosphere of luxury and homage in which his great soul—as indeed any soul would—droops and sickens’. Edward Fitzgerald, the sardonic friend, considered, in the 1870s, that Alfred would have done better with ‘an old Housekeeper like Molière’s’, or perhaps ‘a jolly woman who would have laughed and cried without any reason why’; Tennyson’s best things, he thought, had gone to press in 1842. What, then, is the value of a woman, and what is poetry worth, even one poem, say Maud, or ‘To the Rev. F. D. Maurice’? Thwaite, although she gently reproves Fitzgerald, doesn’t discuss these things. She has set her own limits, and she is not writing a book about Tennyson, but about Emily.

  In fact, Tennyson understood, or at least comprehended his wife very well. He knew that she was motivated by love in its highest form of compassion, not only for himself but for every other human being. Motherless herself, she was conscious every hour of the day of ‘the forlorn ones.’ It wasn’t only that she dreamed on a large scale of old-age pensions for the poor, justice in Schleswig-Holstein, furnished rooms for single working women. Her instinct to rescue and console extended to the future and the past. Admiring Turner’s paintings, she added ‘How one wishes one might have done something to make his life happy.’ Simply to be unfortunate was a good enough claim on Emily.

  Her faith, Tennyson wrote in the dedication to his last poems, was ‘clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven.’ Easy enough to treat this ironically or even satirically, but Ann Thwaite has done neither—she has gone right in among these people like a good, if inquisitive, neighbour who becomes a lifelong friend. She persuades us, or almost persuades us, that Emily mustn’t be thought of as a victim, since she believed her work was as important as it was possible to be. This doesn’t mean that she was satisfied with it. ‘I could have done more,’ she said on her deathbed.

  Times Literary Supplement, 1996

  Twice-Born

  Christina Rossetti: A Divided Life, by Georgina Battiscombe

  Christina Rossetti (1830—1894) wrote ‘If I had words’ and ‘I took my heart in my hand’ and ‘If he would come today, today’ and ‘What would I give for a heart of flesh to warm me through’ and:

  I bent by my own burden must

  Enter my heart of dust.

/>   Her poetry she described as ‘a genuine “lyric cry,” and such I will back against all skilled labour.’ Biographers, though not Christina herself, feel themselves obliged to explain where the passion came from, how it was restrained, and what ought to have been done with it. Then they have to face her preoccupation not only with death but with the grave, and the sensation of lying, remembered or forgotten, under the turf. There was, too, a sardonic Christina, whose comment on art and life was this:

  The mangled frog abides incog,

  The uninteresting actual frog:

  The hypothetic frog alone

  Is the one frog we dwell upon.

  But she was also, and this was central to her whole existence, twice-born. At the age of about thirteen she became, in company with her mother and sister, a fervent High Anglican. The keynote, which Pusey and Keble had set, was self-sacrifice. To find enough to sacrifice and to suffer for, ‘not to keep back or count or leave’—the same impulse as Eliot’s ‘Teach us to care and not to care’—became her prayer, in extremity. She saw herself as a stranger and a pilgrim in this world, waiting for release.

  She was born the youngest of a family of happily settled Anglo-Italian exiles: a pedantic, sentimental, slightly cracked father, an imperturbable mother, Italian visitors and refugees in and out at all hours. The children had their grandfather’s fruit garden near Amersham for a paradise, poverty to keep them from contact with the outside world, admiring relatives to pet them and their mother to educate them. Dante Gabriel and Christina were the ‘storms’ of the family, and, when in a rage, Christina could be a ripper and a smasher. The elder sister, Maria, and loyal William Michael were the ‘calms.’ On ‘My heart is like a singing bird’ William’s editorial comment was: ‘I have more than once been asked whether I could account for the outburst of exuberant joy evidenced in this celebrated lyric; I am unable to do so.’ Christina needed both the saintly narrow-minded sister and the ‘brothers brotherly,’ and there they were: ‘wherever one was, the other was, and that was almost always at home.’

  Like Emily Brontë, Charlotte Mew, and Eleanor Farjeon, she knew the greatest happiness of her hushed life-drama very early on. No wonder that the most radiant of her lyrics are the children’s verses of ‘Sing-Song,’ or others that children readily understand (‘In the Bleak Midwinter,’ ‘Does the Road Wind Uphill?’) or half-understand and can’t get out of their minds, like ‘Goblin Market.’ It is easy to remember this luscious and suggestive temptation poem not quite as it is—or perhaps one remembers it wrong on purpose. ‘The central point,’ as William insisted, is that ‘Laura having tasted the fruits once, and being at death’s door through inability to get a second taste, her sister Lizzie determines to save her at all hazards; so she goes to the goblins, refuses to eat their fruits, and beguiles them into forcing their fruits upon her with so much insistency that her face is all smeared and steeped with the juices; she gets Laura to kiss and suck these juices off her face, and Laura, having thus obtained the otherwise impossible second taste, rapidly recovers.’ It is a story of salvation, which Christina, for what reason we can’t tell, dedicated to her sister Maria.

  As it turned out, she never left the family’s shelter. She became a fountain sealed, a Victorian daughter ageing in the company of her aunts and her beloved mother. Dante Gabriel described her ‘legitimate exercise of anguish under an almost stereotyped smile.’ She broke off two engagements to be married on religious grounds—not, surely, as Maurice Bowra thought, because she was afraid of ‘the claims of the flesh,’ but because she had twice found a sacrifice that was worth the offering.

  Of the dozen or so biographies of Christina, the latest, by Georgina Battiscombe, is the most readable and certainly the most judicious. As an Anglican who has written lives of both Keble and Charlotte M. Yonge, Mrs Battiscombe understands the wellspring of Christina’s religious experience, and she explains it admirably. She is very good, too, on the dutiful day-to-dayishness of the outer life. With calmness and accuracy she counters earlier interpretations that seem to her out of proportion—by Lona Mosk Packer (obsessed with the idea that William Bell Scott was Christina’s lover), Maureen Duffy (engrossed in the phallic symbolism of ‘Goblin Market’), Maurice Bowra, Virginia Woolf. She has, of course, her own explanation. She sees Christina as a warm-blooded Italian conforming through strength of will to a strict Anglicanism—an awkward fit. ‘The poetry’s tension arises when her thwarted experience of eros spilled over into her expression of agape; but to explain her intense love of God simply in terms of repressed sex is too cheap and easy an answer. Love is none the less genuine because it is “sublimated.”’ The subtitle of the book is A Divided Life. On the technique of the poetry, as apart from its subject matter, she has less to say, and she doesn’t do much about relating it to the Tractarian mode, as Professor G. B. Trevelyan has done in his recent Victorian Devotional Poetry. But the story itself could not be more clearly told.

  London Review of Books, 1982

  WILLIAM MORRIS

  His Daily Bread

  William Morris: An Approach to the Poetry, by J. M. S. Tompkins

  As a schoolboy, Rudyard Kipling used to stay in North End Road, Fulham, with his aunt and uncle, the Burne-Joneses. One evening William Morris came into the nursery and, finding the children under the table and nobody else about, climbed onto the rocking-horse and

  slowly surging back and forth while the poor beast creaked, he told us a tale full of fascinating horrors, about a man who was condemned to dream bad dreams. One of them took the shape of a cow’s tail waving from a heap of dried fish. He went away as abruptly as he had come. Long afterwards, when I was old enough to know a maker’s pains, it dawned upon me that we must have heard the Saga of Burnt Njal…Pressed by the need to pass the story between his teeth and clarify it, he had used us.

  Morris’s open-heartedness, his shyness, his reckless treatment of the furniture, his concentration on whatever he had in hand as though the universe contained no other possible goal, all these can be felt clearly enough. Kipling, however, was really listening not to Burnt Njal but to the Eyrbyggia Saga. This was first pointed out by a sympathetic but strong-minded scholar, Dr J. M. S. Tompkins.

  For twenty years, both before and after publishing her Art of Rudyard Kipling, Joyce Tompkins worked on her study of Morris’s poetry. In December 1986 she died, at the age of eighty-nine. Now her book is out at last, not quite in finished form. She grew old and ill, never had the chance to consult the original manuscripts, and could not make her final revisions.

  Morris did, though, and protested forcibly against so many things that the critic has to protect himself. He may know a lot about the first generation of European Communists but less about papermaking or indigo or Victorian business management, Morris being one of the pioneers of a ‘house style.’ In spite of this, all the emphasis today is on his wholeness. In the annotated bibliography that they bring out in two-yearly instalments, David and Sheila Latham ‘resist categorising under such subjects as poetry and politics because we believe that each of Morris’s interests is best understood in the context of his whole life’s work.’ Joyce Tompkins, also, wants to see Morris whole. ‘The wide and varied territory,’ she says, ‘has an integrity which adds to the complexity of study.’ But commentators have to advance in separate fields, keeping in touch as best they can. Although she doesn’t make the claim herself, her book can be seen as a complement to E. P. Thompson’s William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1961). ‘We have to make up our minds about William Morris,’ Thompson said. ‘Either he was an eccentric, isolated figure, personally admirable, but whose major thought was wrong or irrelevant and long left behind by events. On the other hand, it may be that [he] was our greatest diagnostician of alienation.’ Joyce Tompkins is making the case for the Morris who has lost his readers, the narrative poet.

  The telling of tales, as Kipling had realized, was essential to Morris, both before and after he declared for socialism. ‘They grew com
pulsively,’ Joyce Tompkins writes, ‘from his private imaginative life. It is this imaginative life which is my subject.’ But stories, Morris believed, were also necessary as daily bread to human beings, who should listen willingly. If, a hundred years later, they seem to be unwilling, what can be done?

  Her book is divided into six parts, each one aimed at ‘the chief omissions in contemporary understanding and evaluation.’ She begins with The Defence of Guenevere. This was Morris’s first book of poems, appearing in 1858, the year before Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Ballads inspired by (or possibly the inspiration of) Rossetti’s watercolours stand side by side ‘with hard-edged Froissartian themes: “The Haystack in the Floods,” “The Judgment of God.”’ Here Joyce Tompkins believes that modern readers are adrift through ignorance. They are no longer familiar with the field of Arthurian reference. She has noticed, however, that although they have lost the sense of magic, they respond to the tougher element in the poems, the sound ‘between a beast’s howl and a woman’s scream.’