A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  She was soon recalled to London. Mrs Mew rarely let her daughters stay away for long. But the tyrannous old mother was, it turned out, indispensable. In the end, Charlotte’s attachment to her home and family was stronger than her desire to be free: they promised normality, which implies peace. During these apparently quiet years, when, as ‘Miss Lotti,’ she was ordering the dinner or doing social work in the Girls’ Clubs, she became a poet. Hers is a poetry of tensions, which Val Warner defines as ‘passion unfulfilled by the loss of youth, by death, by the working of a malign fate, by the dictates of conventional morality, by renunciation and even by the glorification of renunciation of all love into itself a kind of passion,’ to which I would add the overwhelming conviction of guilt. This is only too clear in ‘Fame,’ where Charlotte Mew sees herself with disgust ‘smirking and speaking rather loud’ at London parties, ‘where no one fits the singer to his song,’ or ‘On the Asylum Road,’ where she is one of the crowd passing the darkened windows which cut off the inmates, or ‘Saturday Market,’ where a wretched woman tries to hide her disgrace under her shawl and sets the market ‘grinning from end to end.’ The images leave the writer, as she put it, ‘burned and stabbed half through.’ They are not experimental, but they are not quite under control either. In the main, the shorter her lyrics are the better, partly because her ear for metre was uncertain over a long stretch (she calculated by syllable, not by stress), and partly because they are cris de coeur. Explaining this in a letter, she gives examples of genuine cris de coeur. Margaret Gautier’s ‘je veux vivre’ and Mrs Gamp’s ‘Drink fair, Betsy, wotever you do.’ Cries have to be extorted: that is their test of tr uth. The quality of emotion is the first requirement of poetry, she said. Given that, she liked to speak in different voices, and for both sexes. She is a ‘cheap, stale chap’ in ‘In Nunhead Cemetery’ and an adolescent French schoolboy, set on edge with frustration, in ‘Fête.’ In ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ the young wife has ‘turned afraid’ and sleeps alone, while the farmer sweats it out only a flight of stairs away.

  ‘Oh, my God! the down, The soft young down of her, the brown The brown of her—her eyes, her hair, her hair!’

  ‘Sexual sincerity is the essential of good emotional work,’ complained Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who, predictably, didn’t like the personae and was ‘often left in a puzzle by the situations.’ But the uncertainty, of course, was in itself sincere, and made a strong, half-uncomfortable appeal to readers as different as Hardy and Virginia Woolf.

  One of these early admirers was the novelist May Sinclair. Charlotte had written to her in 1913 congratulating her on The Combined Maze, a novel in which the image for the human condition is a men and women’s evening gym class at the Polytechnic. The outcome for the hero is sacrifice and repression of ‘the murmur of life in the blood,’ a theme well understood by Charlotte. May replied, ready to embark on another of her many literary friendships, but within a few months Charlotte had begun to fret. May Sinclair was a small, pretty, cat-loving woman and an entirely professional writer. She had many interests, including philosophy and what was then called medico-psychology, and kept an escape route for suffragettes across her back garden. She could deal competently with most situations, and her letters show that when the friendship grew warmer and Charlotte became importunate, she knew how to put her quietly in her place. ‘When I say, “I want to walk with you to Baker Street Station,” I mean I want to walk, and want to walk with you, and I want to walk to Baker Street Station…Better to take things simply and never go back on them, or analyse them, is not it?’ At the same time May was generous in her appreciation of the poems, which Charlotte read aloud to her in her hoarse little male impersonator’s voice. She recommended them to Ezra Pound (who printed ‘Fête’ in The Egoist) and, indeed, to every critic she could think of. She perhaps encouraged Charlotte unduly when she wrote to her: ‘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.’ It was surely a loss on both sides when the friendship abruptly ended, in 1916—17. After the brea ch, there was not much poetry left in Charlotte Mew. In 1969 an American scholar, Theophilus Boll, who was most painstakingly writing the Life of May Sinclair, began to turn this episode over in his mind. ‘If I should find something awful enough,’ he frankly admitted, ‘I might produce a best-seller, instead of an academic “doubtsell.”’ In this he was disappointed, but Dame Rebecca West allowed him to see a letter from G. B. Stern, recalling how May Sinclair had told them, in her ‘neat precise little voice,’ that Charlotte Mew had chased her upstairs into her bedroom, ‘and I assure you, Peter, and I assure you, Rebecca, I had to leap the bed five times.’ Dr Boll says he pondered this, working out with true academic caution how far May Sinclair, who was then over fifty, would really have been able to leap.

  It is not surprising, then, that when she first called at the Poetry Bookshop and was asked, ‘Are you Charlotte Mew?’ her reply was: ‘I am sorry to say I am.’ The Bookshop, during those years the natural meeting-place of poets, was a small room off Theobald’s Road in what was then a slum area of Bloomsbury, and it was largely run and managed by an intense, energetic Hampstead-Polish girl, Alida Klementaski. Alida had read ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ in The Nation, and was ‘electrified.’ ‘This poem I immediately committed to memory, and a year or two later repeated it to Harold Monro, who had recently opened the Poetry Bookshop with the avowed intention of publishing the work of young poets and presenting them to a large audience.’ Charlotte was no longer young, but in 1916 the Bookshop brought out ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ and sixteen other poems in an edition of five hundred copies, with a cover design by Lovat Fraser. After Charlotte’s death Alida, with a good deal of difficulty, composed a memoir that, up to now, has been the standard source of information. There are some unforgettable passages—the chloroforming, for example, of the Mews’ savage old parrot (a job which Alida reluctantly undertook), and the tragic account of the sisters’ last days. But Alida, though a staunch friend, was not qualified to understand the nature of Charlotte’s emotional life. Homosexuality dismayed her. In 1916 she wrote in distress to Harold Monro that she had missed the last 19 bus and been stranded in the rooms of a fellow suffragette: during the night she had been terrified and ‘nearly went off my head when the young woman came into my room—I said “go and get a dressing-gown”…but she said in a curious voice, “No, it’s too much fag.”’ In consideration for this new friend, Charlotte produced an edited version of her lifestory. She did not tell Alida the truth about May Sinclair, and she accounted for her distrust of men (except for the old and tamed) by saying that a lawyer had once cheated her out of a sum of money. So Alida, the first and closest biographer, was also the first to be mystified.

  To her, the fiftyish Charlotte was ‘Auntie Mew,’ and as an eccentric auntie Charlotte became a habituée of the Bookshop. Now that she was modestly well known she was more farouche than ever and more suspicious of patronage, refusing to visit the Sitwells, dodging Lady Ottoline Morrell, intimidating Virginia Woolf, but in the fire-lit bookshop, with Alida’s dogs and Harold Monro’s cat, there was no need for defensiveness. During the Twenties she acquired, also, an elderly beau. Sydney Cockerell, the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, had been struck by ‘The Farmer’s Bride,’ though he was timid at first about ‘the brown of her’: ‘I suppose her sunburnt arms and neck?’ he suggested. In time, Charlotte became one of the middle-aged artistic ladies with whom he conducted decorous flirtations. She was, he noted in his diary, ‘both witty and profound.’ He invited her to Cambridge to see the Fitzwilliam’s Brontë manuscripts, and ‘after tea we sat on the grass, looking at the waterlilies.’ In London they had little suppers in restaurants and saw Charlie Chaplin in Shoulder Arms and Noël Coward in Hay Fever. To Cockerell it seemed that she was subsisting on tea and cigarettes, since Charlotte, like most women living on
a fixed income, had the illusion of being much poorer than she really was. In 1924 he arranged a Civil List pension for her of £75 a year, calling on the ‘Big Three’ (Thomas Hardy, John Masefield, and Walter de la Mare) to give their recommendations. It didn’t matter, he explained when she objected that she was writing nothing—the pension wasn’t dependent on that. For all this kindness she was thankful, but when she needed, as she put it, to listen to her own heart she turned to his wife, Kate, or to Thomas Hardy’s second wife, Florence.

  In 1922 the Mews moved to 86 Delancey Street. It was a smaller house, but they could look down and see the children and the Punch and Judy in the street below. This had always been a resource to Charlotte. ‘The Shade Catchers,’ which Alida thought the best of her poems, simply describes two barefoot children shadow-hopping down a sunny London pavement. The move upset Mrs Mew. She fell, contracted pneumonia, and in May she died. Four years earlier Edith Sitwell had described Charlotte as a grey and tragic woman ‘sucked dry of blood (though not of spirit) by an arachnoid mother,’ but the death did not come as a release. On the contrary, Charlotte felt adrift, ‘like a weed rooted up and thrown over the wall.’ ‘Was not able to be of any use,’ Cockerell noted in his diary. The two sisters retreated to Anne’s studio off the Tottenham Court Road. It was the bachelor establishment that, in the Nineties, they had never had, but without the spirit of those lost days. They looked on it, indeed, as a comedown, and all Charlotte’s warring emotions were concentrated on the protection of her sister. Anne, who had not been able to work for some time, was ill. The illness was cancer of the liver, and Anne began gradually to die in public, for callers were still received. ‘They ought to be allowed to put her to sleep,’ wrote Alida. ‘As I talked to her and she shut her eyes I felt they were sealed on her face and would never open, but they did. Auntie Mew says the Dr says any moment she may go down to earthy mould. Poor little Mew it is more tragic than I can tell you—Her rough little harsh voice and wilful ways hiding enormous depths of feeling—now she will be entirely alone and her relation with Anne has been one of complete love, and I imagine the love of sisters (or brothers) more marvellous than any other as there can be no fleshly implications or sex ual complexities.’

  When Anne died in June 1927, Charlotte felt a survivor’s guilt. It was not the search for recognition, or even the search for love, that was to extinguish her, but the determination to be punished. She convinced herself first that Anne might, as the result of her negligence, have been buried alive, and next that she herself was contaminated and that the black specks in the studio were the germs of cancer. A doctor examined the specks: they were soot. Charlotte was persuaded to go into a private nursing home where the matron was not the kind of woman to understand her, and the view from the window was blocked by a stone wall. After living there alone for about a month, Charlotte Mew went out, bought a bottle of Lysol, and drank half of it. A doctor was called, but she only came round sufficiently to say: ‘Don’t keep me, let me go.’

  ‘24 February 1928,’ Cockerell wrote in his diary. ‘A tragic ending to the tragic life of a very rare being. After dinner wrote a little memoir of her for the Times.’ In the following year the Bookshop brought out ‘The Rambling Sailor,’ with thirty-two more poems—all that could be found by Charlotte’s executors. By the 1930s the grave where Charlotte and Anne lay buried together was neglected, but collectors had begun to buy Charlotte’s letters. In 1940 the research staff of the American publishers H. W. Wilson & Company were at work on their Twentieth-Century Authors, and evidently quite at a loss over her entry. They settled for: ‘She was educated privately, she lived for some time in Paris, she loved someone deeply and hopelessly, she endured poverty and illness and despair.’ She was given a pension, they added, ‘so that she should not starve.’ So the half-myth perpetuated itself. None of this would matter if it did not concern a poet ‘who will be read,’ as Hardy insisted, ‘when others are forgotten.’

  London Review of Books, 1982

  A Questioning Child

  Imagination of the Heart: The Life of Walter de la Mare, by Theresa Whistler

  Walter de la Mare believed that children—if they could be got to listen at all—were the best listeners. I remember as a small girl hearing him at afternoon readings upstairs at the Monros’ Poetry Bookshop in Devonshire Street. I did not consider that he read satisfactorily, though he was better when he took turn and turn about, as he often did, with the valiant Eleanor Farjeon. And he did not look like a poet. I knew how poets ought to look, because at that time they walked about the streets of Hampstead. De la Mare was at the same time too stout and too trim for someone who had met at eve the Prince of Sleep, as I did not doubt that he had. But he was the man who had written Peacock Pie. That was enough.

  But poetry, he said, ‘depends for its life on being remembered,’ and no one knew better than de la Mare that iron rusts, Time returns mocking answers, and poets become what publishers call ‘due for reappraisal.’ Waterstone’s catalogue lists him as ‘not always fashionable, but always popular.’ Even this seems uncertain. Theresa Whistler, in a strong-minded and sympathetic prologue to Imagination of the Heart, tells us that she was determined not to write ‘yet another comprehensive biography of someone formerly esteemed, now neglected, who knew everybody worth knowing.’ Rather than that, she has based her book on a conversation she had with de la Mare at the end of his life, in 1950, at South End House in Twickenham. He suggested then that imagination took distinct forms, and she could tell from his voice that the one he valued most was ‘the imagination of the heart.’ On this element she decided to concentrate, tracing it like a river whose outfall turned out to be very close to its source.

  Theresa Whistler’s qualifications to write this book couldn’t be bettered. She is the granddaughter of Sir Henry Newbolt, de la Mare’s great benefactor, she knew de la Mare himself very well, she has made her way through countless drawersful of papers (he kept everything) and spent several years in research. All the same, I found it difficult to accept the pattern of the heart’s imagination. For half a century, while his mind took journeys into space and eternity, he presented the outside world as it had first come to his notice in the 1870s. Tailors sit cross-legged, children sent to bed blow out their candles, crickets sing behind the wainscot, sweeps and bakers push their carts through the morning streets. The atmosphere, however, is hostile. The fish in the frying pan says ‘Alas!’ but no help comes, and children are drowned with their silver penny or shut up in a bag and stolen. Everywhere there are the cold and solitary, watching from behind closed windows. And why do the rats run over John Mouldy in his cellar, and what does Miss Emily want with that long, shallow box? Sometimes a bargain can be made with the mysterious persecutors by settling—like the poor old Widow in her Weeds—for very little, or simply by running away, as in the stupendous ‘Tom’s Angel.’ Every now and then, there is an epiphany of a moment’s total happiness or innocence—in ‘Chicken,’ in ‘Full Moon’ (‘One night when Dick lay fast asleep’), and in the miraculous three verses of ‘The Funeral.’ But James Reeves, in his Penguin anthology Georgian Poetry (1962), includes ‘Drugged,’ ‘Dry August Burned,’ ‘The Feckless Dinner Party’ (they are trapped in the cellars), ‘The Marionettes’ (‘Let the foul scene proceed’), ‘Echo’ (which repeats ‘Who cares? ’), ‘The Dove’ (its voice ‘dark with disquietude’), ‘Treachery,’ and ‘Tit for Tat,’ where the trapper Tom Noddy ends up hanging still from a hook ‘on a stone-cold pantry shelf.’ In some of these poems there is regret and dismay, but the imagination they show is not of the heart but of second sight, or rather second senses, icily alert. ‘Their atmosphere is like that of overpowering memory,’ Edward Thomas thought. ‘Never was child so tyrannous a father to the man.’

  Her account of de la Mare’s early life turned out, Whistler explains, ‘rather like a row of late-nineteenth-century engravings.’ It begins in a small, overcrowded house in Charlton, now part of Woolwich, where Walter (always called Jac
k) was born in 1873, the sixth of seven children. When his father died, the family moved to Forest Hill. His biographer thinks that these outer suburbs, on the shadowy borderline of London and country, were an image to him of persistent straying between dreaming and waking. In any case, he seems never to have lost the child’s special faculties—daydreaming, make-believe, questioning. In middle age, he would still deliberately ask himself: what is it like to be a river? a house? a blind man? To him, as to Blake, the child was an exile who must make the best of his way home.

  De la Mare was educated at St Paul’s Choir School, where, although not an angel chorister, he did well enough. ‘Music,’ he thought, ‘even if not closely attended to, is on this earth what the soul can unwittingly breathe, to its infinite benefit.’ At the age of sixteen, he started as a copy clerk with the Anglo-American Oil Company. In the evenings he sat down to study grammar and poetry. ‘When he opened his books his real day’s work began.’ Although the office was not congenial, the Nineties were, and it seems that he was drawn to stories of the exquisite and the violent, and grew his hair to an aesthetic length. It was at this point that he changed the spelling of his name from Delamare, to emphasize his Huguenot ancestry. But his nights of self-education began with words. ‘Sound and meaning are inseparable,’ he wrote in ‘How I Became an Author,’ ‘and the words themselves become the means of make-believe—one of the richest of human consolations.’ He was turning himself into a wordmaster—a craftsman in sound ‘beyond Music’s faintest Hark!’ Meanwhile, he had a growing collection of editors’ rejection slips.