L.E.L.

by Lucasta Miller

  Jerdan lavished Letitia with the attention she had always craved but rarely received. On a single day, he took her to visit St. Paul’s Cathedral, which she had never seen before, then on to a private performance by the celebrated comedian Charles Mathews, ending up at a literary dinner party given by the publisher Thomas Longman, where Letitia may have been the only female guest. Mathews was famous for his stage show, “Stories,” in which he proved himself a chameleonic master of the quick change, adopting new identities at speed. Letitia’s own talents for masquerade may have been encouraged by witnessing him in action.

  Catherine Landon did not chaperone her daughter on these cultural jaunts. She must have turned a blind eye to Jerdan’s grooming, only too delighted that he was prepared to put in so much time and effort.

  Jerdan attempted to interest Longman in The Fate of Adelaide, but to no avail. The publisher was not prepared to take a risk on a young unknown, no doubt surmising that Jerdan’s enthusiasm for his protégée was not purely literary. In the end, the book was taken on by John Warren of Bond Street, who agreed to publish it but only at the author’s expense. Letitia’s grandmother Mrs. Bishop found the money, and Mrs. Siddons was finally persuaded to accept the dedication.

  The Fate of Adelaide was finally published in July 1821 with the author’s full name, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, on the title page. Jerdan did his best to puff it with a glowing review in the Gazette, adding as a proviso that the young neophyte needed to work harder—presumably under his tutelage—to fulfill her potential. However, the book failed to find an audience. “ ’Twas my first,” Letitia later told an admirer, “perhaps you will be so very good as to read it; I believe no one else has.” Certainly, no one made the connection when, only a few weeks later, the first poems signed “L.E.L.” began appearing in the Gazette.

  Letitia had signed her dedicatory epistle to Mrs. Siddons with her initials. It was probably on seeing them there that Jerdan first formulated the plan to use “L.E.L.” as an alias: the sonorous palindrome with its Satanic hint of “hell,” its echo of the French for “she” evoking the eternal feminine, and, as Laman Blanchard later pointed out in a comic poem, its parallel with the somewhat less romantic “L.S.D.”: pounds, shillings, and pence.

  Jerdan had learned that in literary marketing, as in seduction, the oblique method could be more effective than the overt appeal. In exploiting the idea of the unseen author, he was following recent trends. Walter Scott had hidden his identity from the public when financial pressures inspired him to turn from poetry to the less prestigious but roaring trade of fiction. Although not consciously intended as a marketing ploy, publishing his Waverley novels anonymously earned him the title the “Great Unknown” and created a mystery that boosted sales. By the time he was definitively unmasked in 1821, he had become the most successful novelist of the day.

  L.E.L., who was only semi-anonymous, offered Byronic added value, since her poetry revolved around the poet’s unseen “I.” Her adoption of the initials in September 1821 led to her promotion from the amateurs’ column to the prestigious “Original Poetry” slot. It also opened the poetic floodgates. Verse after verse began to pour forth on a near-weekly basis.

  “Throughout the year 1822, L.E.L. was as full of song as the nightingale in May; and excited a very general enthusiasm by [her] Sapphic warmth,” Jerdan later put it. Behind the scenes, the new alter ego may have intensified the physical encounters between poetess and patron, as if L.E.L. could do things Letitia could not have done, although we cannot know exactly when they first slept together.

  In his autobiography, Jerdan stated that the “mystery of L.E.L.” could only be unlocked by a hidden master key, without which “critics and biographers” would “guess, and speculate, and expatiate for ever” but make “nothing of their reveries.” The secret, he claimed, was that all her poetry had been inspired by her passion for himself, which he overtly depicted as Platonic “grateful and devoted attachment” on her part, in spite of his insinuating use of sensual vocabulary elsewhere.

  Now that we know they had three children together, his portrayal of their relationship as an innocent one-way crush sounds laughable. But Jerdan was not wholly inventing it when he said that Letitia’s early poetry was personally addressed to him. Some of it demonstrably was.

  Letitia’s sketch on Sappho, for example, published in the Gazette on May 4, 1822, interpolated a new backstory whose private significance could only have been evident to Jerdan, as her wider readership had no idea of her real-life situation. Making Sappho’s legendary beloved Phaon a mere stand-in, she gave the Greek poetess a more important, unnamed first love: her poetry tutor.

  As L.E.L. depicted it, the young Sappho looked up to him with all

  Youth’s deep and passionate idolatry:

  Love was her heart’s sole universe—he was to her

  Hope, Genius, Energy, the God

  Her inmost spirit worshipped.

  Whether or not the verse expressed Letitia’s unvarnished feelings for her real-life mentor is less certain. The very fact that she could step back far enough to portray her devotion to him as “idolatry” suggests she could already see his feet of clay. However, she was caught in a cycle of seduction. She had to flatter Jerdan, week after week, to ensure he would keep publishing her poetry.

  Letitia Landon’s great paradox is that the clues she left about her private life are not to be found in diaries or letters but in her most public utterances, her poetry. The relationship between the latter’s emotional content and her private, subjective feelings is the hardest aspect of her legacy to unravel. She brings into focus one of the knottiest philosophical problems in criticism: that of authorial intentionality.

  Even in her own time, L.E.L.’s emotional sincerity or otherwise was regarded as the crux of her literary identity. Was her love poetry “true to the very life”? Or were her “passions” mere “pasteboard”? Jerdan claimed that the emotions in the poetry were genuine, but Blanchard went out of his way “to impress on the reader’s mind the fact, that there was not the remotest connection or affinity, not indeed a colour of resemblance, between her every-day life or habitual feelings and the shapes they were made to assume in her poetry.”

  The uncomfortable reality is that both Jerdan and Blanchard told a version of the truth. Across her career, Letitia’s poems turn out to be demonstrably full of buried references to her real-life situations. Yet they do not provide the straight “emotional honesty” of unimpeded access into her naked feelings. Her work was, rather, less expressive than performative, less existential than instrumental. Indeed, her project of poetic sentimentalization was a textbook reflection of Schiller’s theory, outlined in his seminal 1796 essay Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung. According to Schiller, the corrupt complexities of the modern world meant that art could no longer directly express authentic feeling. Instead it had to translate banal experience into idealized formulae.

  Letitia’s own accounts of the process of composition suggest that, far from writing to express her feelings, she wrote to prevent herself from having to feel them. Poetic composition provided her with a druglike escape. “Poetry always carries me out of myself,” she explained. “It is the most subtle and interesting of pleasures, but, like all pleasures, it is dearly bought; it is always succeeded by extreme depression of spirits, and an overpowering sense of bodily fatigue.” While focused on the task, “the whole frame trembles with eagerness.” When it is over, there is “no strength left to bear life’s other emotions.”

  In Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” the poet experiences a dissociated state under the influence of “some dull opiate” and is then returned to his “sole self.” Letitia’s self was never sole. She was always putting on another mask.

  In her Sappho poem of 1822, Letitia used the simile of a bird to depict the poetess’s relation to her mentor:

  …she was
unto him

  As a young bird, whose early flight he trained,

  Whose first wild songs were sweet, for he had taught

  Those songs.

  In their personal mythology, she was the songbird and Jerdan her trainer. His favorite line of hers was “We love the bird we taught to sing.”

  The bird image was a standard Romantic topos, used by Keats in his “Ode to a Nightingale,” and by Shelley, who compared the poet to “a nightingale, who sits in darkness, and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.” When used by a female poet, which it sometimes was, the metaphor’s ugly subtext was foregrounded.

  In classical mythology, Philomel was turned into a nightingale after being raped by Tereus, who cut out her tongue to prevent her accusing him, as is hinted at in the “purple-stained mouth” of Keats’s ode. Once a bird, Philomel would forever sing a beautiful song. Her fate was that its meaning—the history of the rape—would never be understood by human listeners.

  In making the import of L.E.L.’s “songs” purposefully obscure, Letitia was using the Philomel myth, hinting at her own “fall,” yet burying the truth about the backstage sexual transactions that lay behind her public voice. There is no evidence that Jerdan forced himself on her with physical violence, as Tereus did on Philomel, but their relationship was unequal. He was a middle-aged man with the patriarchal power of patronage; she was a teenager desperate for affirmation.

  Jerdan frequently took the credit for L.E.L.’s creativity, but the dynamic between then was much more complex than, say, the one-way trajectory that exists between the fictional Trilby and Svengali in George du Maurier’s classic 1894 novel. Trilby is an uneducated singer whose extraordinary performances are unlocked when her master hypnotizes her into a trance; on waking, she can recall nothing. L.E.L.’s poetry often alludes to the myth of the unconscious artist but suggests that she was always conscious: both of the power play in which she was involved and at the multiple levels at which her own consciousness was operating.

  Letitia had an uncanny ability to split off the unspoken, embattled aspects of herself and symbolize them through the surrogate of L.E.L. With her brain caught up in her own technical skill at performing the role of the lovelorn woman, she was insulated from feeling, yet able to access and project the conflicts inherent in her actual situation. Her poetry invites us to see and not see, but the most intriguing aspect of her sensibility is her self-voyeurism. She was performing for her trainer, and for the readers of the Gazette, but she was her own audience too, as, with a mix of disinhibition and cold calculation, she projected her “cave-locked” psyche into dissociated poetic formulae.

  In the following extract, for example, published in the Gazette in March 1825, she put a fateful, phallic engraving tool into her teacher’s hand while conjuring an image of herself in a traumatized, incantatory dream state:

  And you took my young heart,

  And what did you grave there,

  But a deep and deadly lesson

  Its first and last despair…

  And my tears shall be as streams

  Cave-locked beneath the earth

  Of whose flowing no one dreams.

  As so often, the theatrical artifice with which she plays the submissive role in the poetry contains its own hint of buried irony. In reality, it was always Letitia’s lines that would be “graved” (or printed) in the next issue of the Gazette. As she produced poem after poem, the contrast with the editor’s own lack of creativity was obvious. Her work frequently invoked the Pygmalion myth, but she was Jerdan’s Pygmalion as much as he was hers, as she transformed him over and over again, with semi-mocking excess, into the idol for whom her abject heroines hungered.

  Jerdan harnessed Letitia’s extraordinary drive to the full. In May 1822, he put her to the test. On their way back from a joint trip into town, they passed St. George’s Hospital at Hyde Park Corner, whereupon he challenged her to produce an extempore poem on the subject.

  The power loom had transformed the textile industry. Horse-drawn transport had become so effective that it was shrinking distances more astonishingly than the coming of the railways later would. Since 1814, new technology meant that The Times was now being printed at 1,100 sheets per hour. The editor was clearly hoping for similar advances in poetic productivity.

  Letitia did not disappoint. As Jerdan recalled, “Dinner passed, and within an hour the ladies were joined at tea, by which time a most touching poem of seventy-four lines was completed on the given theme.” The resulting composition, published in the Gazette on May 27, 1822, was indeed an extraordinary feat of extemporization. However, the word “touching” does not quite describe its queasy aesthetic.

  Conjuring the modern city as a place of morbid decay, the poem captures the fall of Romanticism into decadence, embodying the diseased “mawkishness” Keats embraces in his preface to Endymion. L.E.L. imagines herself stepping from a crowded London street into a ward for the dying. Three anonymous patients capture her attention: a soldier, whose mangled body is gashed with scars; a seduced girl who had “loved, / Trusted and been betrayed,” the victim, perhaps, of an offstage suicide attempt or botched abortion; and a consumptive Keatsian poet, “too visionary for this world,” en route to an atheist’s defiant death. The sufferings of all three heroic outcasts are aestheticized, and thus politically neutralized. With her “marble brow,” the girl has become a beautiful, passive work of art.

  The poem’s perverse sentimentalization of violence, pain, and degradation contrasts oddly with the cozy bourgeois scenario in which it was composed: a middle-class party with ladies drinking tea. It puts one in mind of Heine’s ironic lyric “At the Tea Table” (“Am Teetisch”), first published in 1822, in which a group of respectable ladies and gentlemen euphemistically discuss the sordid risks of love, including sexually transmitted disease, while politely pretending they are not. When a Fräulein innocently expresses incomprehension at their drift, it is left up to the reader to decide if she is feigning.

  Such it was with Letitia, whose original audience, perhaps including her own mother and governess, could never decide quite how knowing she was. There is a cognitive dissonance at play in “St George’s Hospital, Hyde-Park Corner,” where the dying poet’s “fallen state” is simultaneously “mark[ed]” and “unheeded.” For Letitia, the adrenaline rush of composing under pressure was intensified by the thrill of hiding in plain sight at Mrs. Jerdan’s tea table.

  William Jerdan was a family man but also a libertine. In the absence of John Landon, not just Letitia but her brother was drawn into his saturnalian orbit. Although Whittington went up to Oxford in March 1823 to read for the Church, he too, it transpires, was taken under Jerdan’s wing. Neither sibling had a good relationship with Catherine. Both in John’s absence transferred their allegiance to their new father figure, encouraged by his generosity with alcohol. L.E.L.’s early poetry contains a surprising number of drinking songs, and several references to beautiful young girls disinhibited by wine. One of Whittington’s few published works is a free-form essay on the drinking habits of the Bacchanalian, “Elixir Vitae.” It appears next to a piece by Jerdan on “The Last Bottle” in a macabre volume, Death’s Doings (1827), edited and illustrated by Jerdan’s artist friend Richard Dagley.

  That volume’s slippery tone and sick humor are typical of the age of cant. Showcasing the pleasures that lead humans to their graves, it poses as a series of morality tales, but leaves the reader in little doubt that dangerous pleasures are worth the hazards. After the Napoleonic Wars, a devil-may-care hedonism permeated culture all over Europe. The “wine, women, and song” of Schubert’s circle—the “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” of the day—was born of despair, not cheery optimism. Letitia’s feminine contribution to Dagley’s volu
me sentimentalizes death as the ultimate risk of sex for a woman.

  In contrast to the depressed Catherine, Jerdan offered excitement at a time when the Landon family was in disarray. He not only flattered Letitia’s embryonic talent and printed her work, but introduced her into the inner circle of the literary avant-garde. Letitia’s one extant letter from 1822 is addressed to a previously unidentified Mr. Richards. He must in fact have been Thomas Richards, who had been at school with Keats. His brother Charles, another schoolfellow, had published Keats’s first book, Poems of 1817.

  This was access to bona fide “Cockney” culture, as it was then known. The term later became identified with working-class East Enders, but in Keats’s day it referenced the bohemian subculture of London’s suburbs. Letitia gushingly told Richards how gratified she felt that he had compared her style to Keats’s, telling him how much she admired Lamia and Endymion. She also informed him jokily that she was no more “rationalised or reformé” than when last they met, apparently boasting about how liberated she was. In the early days, she positively flaunted her affair with Jerdan among literary men. Her lack of discretion later came back to haunt her.

  Cockney society certainly accommodated a few liberated women who pursued love for its own sake out of wedlock, such as the mysterious Isabella Jones, with whom Keats had an affair before he fell in love with Fanny Brawne. Isabella’s surviving correspondence is written in a style almost identical to that of Letitia’s letter to Richards, combining poetical enthusiasm with Mary Crawford wit.

  Mrs. Jones was, however, in her thirties, evidently separated from her husband, and possessed of a private income that allowed her to live alone in comfortable lodgings, which she furnished with a statue of Napoleon and an Aeolian lyre, emblems of radical chic. She lavished her toy boy Keats with presents, but also confused him with her coquettish mixed messages, frequent disappearances, and enigmatic origins. Even so independent a woman as Mrs. Jones felt she had to erect a smokescreen.