A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  The idea of the rhyme sheets may have come to Monro from the Dun Emer Press broadsides and the Flying Fame rhyme sheets, which the Bookshop took over in 1914, but they became distinctively his own. In the Chapbook No. 35, March 1923, he wrote that ‘certain distinctive qualities are essential to a successful Broadside, and it will be found, if these are studied, that only a few poems possess them.’ What are they? He never made this quite clear, perhaps, even to himself, but an important point was their impact. The poems vary a good deal in length, but they are usually short, sometimes cut down, even when (as with Blake’s ‘Schoolboy,’ The New Broadside No. 6) this means changing the meaning entirely. In commissioning his illustrators Monro showed none of his hesitation with authors. They were the best he could get—Lovat Fraser, Charles Winzer (who designed two signboards for Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Co.; both were stolen), John and Paul Nash, Albert Rutherston, later David Jones, McKnight Kauffer, Edy Legrand, Edward Bawden. The illustrations, particularly Lovat Fraser’s, were often decorations, almost independent of the text. But Monro, in the spirit of William Blake, wanted the verse and the picture to make their impression together. The sheets were meant to be pinned up and replaced at will, but the memory would retain the song and the last word would belong, not to time, but to joy, a memory which would last when the sheets were thrown away with the rubbish or blown with the wind. Robert Frost, waiting for a train on Beaconsfield station during his first visit to England, had seen a bit of paper blowing about at his feet, and picking it up he had read for the first time Ralph Hodgson’s ‘Eve,’ printed as a ‘filler.’ This kind of chance, this kind of contact, was what Monro hoped for with the rhyme sheets. As to poetry, he once said, ‘the less of it printed the better; and the more of it carried in the memory and conveyed by the voice, much, much, the better.’ This, surely, is one of the strangest remarks ever made by a hard-working publisher. But the rhyme sheets’ verses were carried in the memory. The writer William Plomer, looking back through thirty years, remembered how as a boy at Rugby he had hung the rhyme sheets on the walls of his room, ‘best of all, de la Mare’s “Arabia,” with gaudy decorations by (I expect) Lovat Fraser.’ Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote in August 1952 to Leonard Bacon, ‘Your mention of Ralph Hodgson and his broadsides swept me back to the public at fisticuffs. Broadsides were what one bought at Munro’s (sic) Poetry Bookshop, only I think we called them rhyme-sheets. Like a galley proof, as you say, with rough coloured woodcuts heading and tailing them, often drawn by Lovat Fraser. And we tacked them on our walls, above our beds and our baths. I remember one I was particularly attached to, that began

  Oh, what shall the man full of sin do,

  Whose heart is as cold as a stone,

  When the black owl looks in through the window,

  And he on his deathbed alone?’

  (This particular poem was the first to be issued, and surely only the conscience-ridden Monro would have chosen it.) Sylvia Townsend Warner couldn’t remember the author, and Plomer couldn’t remember the artist (in fact Charles Winzer), which is not surprising, since these names were usually printed as small as possible. In a sense, they didn’t matter; this was poetry, as Monro described it to Amy Lowell, to be ‘sold anywhere and everywhere, carried in the pocket, read in the train.’ This makes it hard work, of course, for today’s collector and bibliographer.

  Finally, in both the first and the second Bookshops, children were not forgotten. Although Harold and Alida were, in their different ways, rather intimidating for a young child, and cats, kittens and dogs were needed as intermediaries, everything they published for children was successful. There were special rhyme sheets for them in both the two series and in the New Broadsides, which opened with de la Mare’s ‘The Huntsmen.’ (It was disappointing, perhaps, that Ethelbert White had drawn the horsemen riding up the stairs to bed at the top, but not, in the tailpiece, going downstairs again.) Eleanor Farjeon gave readings of her verses from the Nursery Sheets, while Lovat Fraser’s ‘Rhymes for Children’ in the November 1919 Chapbook was so popular that they were reprinted on their own. Other poems, not in the first place intended for children, were dearly loved—Charlotte Mew’s ‘The Changeling’ (from The Farmer’s Bride), Frances Cornford’s ‘To a Fat Lady Seen from a Train’ (from Spring Morning), and Harold Monro’s ‘Overheard on a Saltmarsh’ (from Children of Love, and reprinted as a rhyme sheet), which has been called ‘as complete and inexplicable as a thing seen suddenly and clearly between sleeping and waking’ and was inspired by the green glass beads of an actress, Vera Tschaikovska. Osbert Sitwell declared that the children of a racecourse tough who lived next door to the Bookshop were offered some of the rhyme sheets but tore them up and stamped on them. This Monro would have to mark as another defeat. But it is fair to say that the Poetry Bookshop made a lasting impression on two generations.

  Introduction to The Poetry Bookshop: A Bibliography by

  Howard J. Woolmer, 1988

  Miss Lotti’s Story

  Charlotte Mew: Collected Poems and Prose, edited by Val Warner

  During her lifetime Charlotte Mew was either greatly liked or greatly disliked, and now, more than fifty years after her death, those who are interested in her are very much interested. There are at least two collections of her papers which nobody is given permission to see—not quite with the feeling that she ought to be left to rest in peace, but, rather, that she shouldn’t be shared indiscriminately with outsiders. She was a writer who was completely successful perhaps only two or three times (though that is enough for a lyric poet) and whose sad life, in spite of many explanations, refuses quite to be explained.

  Val Warner, who has worked for so long and against so many difficulties to produce this edition, is to be congratulated. The prose pieces and seven of the poems have been collected for the first time, there are five new poems, and the fifty-four lines which were cut from ‘In Nunhead Cemetery’ in Duckworth’s collected edition of 1953 have been put back. There is a level-headed introduction and a bibliographical note (to which Sir Sydney Cockerell’s diaries should be added). Val Warner, herself a poet, is not primarily interested in biography. I am therefore hoping to expand and correct one or two points.

  Charlotte Mew, who lived from 1869 to 1928, changed very little for about thirty years of her life. She was tiny, trim, curly-haired, and pale, wearing size-two boots—doll’s boots. Her eyebrows were fixed in a half-moon of surprise, apparently at a joke. What joke? Possibly one that she liked to tell: a hearse-driver runs over a man and kills him, and a passer-by shouts: ‘Greedy!’ She was the sort of person whose luggage is carried by helpful young men, and yet she regarded the world with defiance, answering inquiries with a toss of the head, and carrying her umbrella like a weapon. This umbrella, with which she repelled tiresome children on the beach, was part of her Victorian character as ‘Miss Mew’ or ‘Miss Lotti.’ Among what she called ‘good five o’clock people,’ she guarded this personality carefully. Only when she felt sure of her company would she sometimes let herself go, and like most melancholics, prove wildly entertaining. But at the same time Charlotte Mew was writing, and indeed living, à rebours, under the threat of insanity and in the dark thrill of self-inflicted frustration. The split could not be concealed indefinitely, and by the 1920s her appearance had altered, and shocked. ‘Her wind-blown grey hair, her startled grey eyes, her thin white face, belonged to a reluctant visitor from another world, frightened at what she had undergone in this one.’ The biographer has not so much to reconstruct her life as to account for what life did to her.

  Charlotte Mew was the third child (out of eight) of Fred Mew, a farmer’s son from the Isle of Wight, who had come to London to be trained as an architect by H. E. Kendall. In 1863 he married Kendall’s daughter, a tiny, silly woman who was ‘above’ him, and always made him feel so: he was made to describe his own father, on the marriage certificate, as ‘Esquire.’ Charlotte remembered her childhood as happy. Looking back, she was quite sure, as English poets are,
that there had been a happier time. That had been in the two top rooms of 10 Doughty Street, with the round table and the rocking horse, and a doll’s house designed by Fred. Here Lotti, radiant, passionate, and excitable, ruled the nursery, hopped up beside the driver whenever a cab was called, and was half-mad with excitement at Christmas. She told Florence Hardy that she ‘never outgrew the snowflakes.’ And yet when she was only seven, two of her brothers died—one a baby, one, her great playmate, a six-year-old. Lotti, as was then considered right, was taken in to see him in his coffin. The steadying influence was their Yorkshire nurse, Elizabeth Goodman, tenderly described in Charlotte’s article ‘An Old Servant’: ‘as fixed a part of the Universe as the bath (cruelly cold in winter) into which she plunged us every morning, and the stars to which she pointed through the high window, naming some of them, in the evening sky.’ But it was also this faithful servant who imprinted on Lotti’s mind the Evangelical sense of guilt and retribution. Every sin—and every happiness—has been calculated in advance, though not by us, and must be paid for.

  Sweetheart, for such a day

  One mustn’t count the score;

  Here, then, it’s all to pay,

  It’s good-night at the door.

  This was the poem, ‘Fin de Fête,’ that in 1916 attracted the attention of Thomas Hardy and convinced him of Charlotte Mew’s talent. Hardy, of course, didn’t need to be persuaded that the Spirit of the Universe was exacting, and Charlotte had the kind of temperament that accepted this without question, even in the nursery.

  In 1882 Charlotte was sent to the Gower Street School, which had connections with Bedford College. Here, at the age of fourteen, she fell violently in love with her headmistress, Lucy Harrison. Miss Harrison was one of the great educationalists of the turn of the century. ‘There was something royal in her nature,’ Octavia Hill wrote. There was also a strongly masculine element. She was one of the conspicuous successes of the liberal and unsectarian Bedford College: a brilliant scholar (as well as an expert carpenter) and a supporter of liberal movements—she kept as a souvenir a cigar given her by Mazzini. Her aim was to open windows for her pupils, both for the body and the mind. During this first important post the strain on her temperament proved too great, and in 1883 she was forced by what was called ‘a breakdown in health’ to resign. One of the old Gower Street pupils, Mrs Alice Lee, said that when the news was given out Charlotte, who had been playing the piano, ‘jumped up and in a wild state of grief started to bang her head against the wall.’ Alice, who was younger, wondered if she ought to bang her head too. Miss Harrison retired for the time being to Hampstead, where she continued to coach her favourite girls. Lotti was one of them: Fred Mew innocently believed that it would ‘stabilize’ her to keep in sight of the beloved teacher. Her friends remembered that at this time she was in such high spirits, and so amusing, that the walk from Bloomsbury to Haverstock Hill seemed short. After two years, however, Lucy Harrison fell deeply and permanently in love with Amy Greener, who had taken over the Gower Street School. ‘Dearest, I do not feel at home anywhere without you now,’ she wrote. ‘With the person you love comes a halo and a glow over everything, however miserable and poor, and without that presence the light seems to leave the sun itself. This is a trite remark, I am afraid.’ Miss Greener later wrote on this delicate subject delicately, saying that she had often been asked whether her friend’s life had ‘lacked the perfect rounding love can bring.’ She assured her readers that it had not, and the two of them lived for many years of unclouded happiness together in Yorkshire.

  Besides this first experience of desertion, Lucy Harrison left with Charlotte her ideals of restraint and self-discipline, even in small things (‘if a pudding is begun with a fork, the help of a spoon must not be called in half-way through’), and a passion for English literature. The books she read with the inner group allowed for a certain release of emotion—in fact, for Miss Harrison’s soppy side: the Brownings, the Brontës, Alice Meynell, Francis Thompson, Tagore’s ‘King of the Dark Chamber’ and ‘The Post Office.’ When Charlotte Mew found her individual voice, all these influences persisted, just as her school friends remained her first and last refuge throughout her life. With them there was less need for concealment, because they had grown up with Charlotte and knew the unpleasant secrets of the Mews’ new home at 9 Gordon Street. By 1888 the eldest son, Henry, and the youngest Freda, were both incurably insane. Both had to be confined, Henry with his own nurse, in Peckham Hospital, Freda in the Carisbrooke Mental Home on the Isle of Wight, the town which Charlotte described, twenty years later, in ‘Ken’:

  So when they took

  Ken to that place, I did not look

  After he called, and turned on me

  His eyes. These I shall see—

  Ken, however, is represented as an amiable idiot, whereas both Henry and Freda were victims of what was then called dementia praecox—that is, schizophrenia. ‘In Nunhead Cemetery’ sets out to represent the process of the split mind—‘a sudden lapse from sanity and control,’ as she explained it—by the dreadful heap of earth and flowers in the graveyard. Meanwhile the guilty identification with the two unfortunates, and the heavy expense of having them looked after, darkened the Mews’ respectable daily life. Charlotte wrote of 9 Gordon Street as ‘The Quiet House.’ She had a wretched fantasy that one evening when the front-door bell rang, she would answer it and face herself, waiting outside in the street.

  In September 1898 Fred Mew died of cancer. During his long illness Charlotte had made her first appearance in print with a short story, ‘Passed,’ which was published in the Yellow Book for July 1894. I think she probably began to write in order to make some money. Mrs Mew was left, or made out that she was left, badly off, and lamented that she would have to let off half of the house. Anne had trained at the Queen’s Square Female School of Art as a screen and furniture painter. Charlotte had been trained for nothing, so she wrote. She wrote slowly, and, like the heroine of New Grub Street, did her time in the British Museum Reading Room, grinding articles (‘The Governess in Fiction,’ ‘Mary Stuart in Fiction’) out of other people’s books. Original to the point of wilfulness when the impulse to poetry came, she seems, with these prose contributions, to have studied the market. In ‘In the Curé’s Garden’ she is imitating Villette, in ‘Mark Stafford’s Wife’ she is imitating Henry James, in ‘The Wheat’ she is imitating May Sinclair, and in ‘The Fatal Fidelity’ she seems to be having a shot at W.W. Jacobs.

  Her first story, ‘Passed,’ is the most impulsive and interesting of the lot. The subject is guilt. A respectable young woman hardens her heart when a prostitute appeals to her for help. Later she wanders into a Catholic church as the candles are lit for Benediction, and sees a girl patiently helping her imbecile sister. She knows then how far she has failed in human love. ‘Passed’ is appealing because the painful emotion is felt as true, but it is a period piece: apart from the scene at the altar and the prostitute, we get the prostitute’s dying sister, the cynical clubman who seduces them both, and the haunting scent of violets in a cheap china cup. No wonder it was accepted immediately by Henry Harland, the Yellow Book’s editor. To her old friends—rather left behind at this point—Lotti seemed one of the New Women. She went about London unescorted, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, her hair cut short as Miss Harrison’s had been, and wearing a smaller version of Miss Harrison’s black velvet jacket, collar, and tie. She was now in the orbit of Harland’s contributors and John Lane’s Keynotes—‘George Etherton,’ Evelyn Sharp, Netta Syrett, and the languid but sharp-witted Ella D’Arcy. These young women were not Bohemians: they were dandies. They objected when Frederick Rolfe left lice on the furniture; Beardsley was ‘a dear boy’ to them. At the Victorian Club for Professional Women, or in the new flats and studios, they talked with passion and spirit. As Evelyn Sharp puts it in her reminiscences, ‘We were on the crest of the wave, and felt that everything must go.’ Meanwhile they lived on very small incomes. It was a gallant fel
lowship, but precarious. When her brother died in 1901, Charlotte made a run to Paris and the companionship of Ella D’Arcy. When she describes how she walked through the rai n and the dazzling lights to help Ella arrange her bed-sitting room in the Rue Chat we get a last glimpse of the decade that had suited her best.