RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

by Philip Hoare

  To lose a brother and a son dismantles a family, throws the future into doubt. At the age of twenty-three, my brother crashed his car and lay comatose in hospital for a week. We too experienced days when he was neither with us nor we without him. I watched through the banisters as my father wept, an awful sight; and at the age of eleven, I refused to accept that Andrew was never coming back, partly because I still saw his fuzzy shape outlined in my bedroom doorway, like an after-image from the sun.

  Elizabeth was racked with guilt, because her father had disapproved of Edward going to Torquay. She was being punished. The sea which had summoned her in hope had taken her hope, the one person for whom her life was worth living. Now she could not wait to get away from ‘this dreadful dreadful place … These walls – & the sound of what is very fearful a few yards from them – that perpetual dashing sound, have preyed on me. I have been crushed, trodden down. God’s will is terrible!’

  Later, after she had become the most famous female poet of her age, legend would create an impossible scene of Elizabeth on a balcony, looking out to the bay as Bro perished in the waves, as if she had watched him being dragged down below. ‘The associations of this place, lie upon me, struggle as I may, like the oppression of a perpetual night-mare. It is an instinct of self-preservation which impels me to escape – or to try to escape.’ The sea evoked weird, woozy images that seemed to be products of her addiction. In an essay on the Greek poets published soon after Bro had drowned she discussed a dead language, ‘pang by pang, each with a dolphin colour – yielding reluctantly to that doom of death and silence which must come at last to the speaker and the speech. Wonderful it is to look back fathoms down the great past, thousands of years away.’ Transported in time and space as Virginia Woolf would be, she too associated her loved one with a cetacean: ‘Faint and dim | His spirits seemed to sink in him – | Then, like a dolphin, change and swim.’

  As soon as she could, Elizabeth left the sea behind. On 1 September 1841 she was taken from Torquay in a specially sprung carriage with a bed to allow her to remain supine; it took ten days to reach London as they had to stop frequently to allow her to rest. The sound of the sea was now hateful to her; she retreated to her dark bedroom deep in the city to drown out the noise. ‘I cannot look back to any month or week of that year without horror, & a feeling of the wandering of the senses,’ she would recall. ‘Places are ideas, and ideas can madden or kill.’ She told John Ruskin, ‘I belong to a family of West Indian slaveholders, and if I believed in curses, I should be afraid.’ She would give anything ‘to own some purer lineage than that of the blood of the slave! Cursed are we from generation to generation!’ It was as if she were labouring under a vodou hex; as though Bro, heir to those estates, had died under a malediction.

  Elizabeth’s own life had ended; her illness would never be dismissed. All she faced was a reduced existence. Dressed in black silk, her tiny pale-dark face and huge eyes and strangely wide mouth framed by her thick brown curls – ‘Of delicate features, – paler, near as grave’ – she seemed unnaturally preserved by grief and seclusion, all but tattered and frayed. Immured in her mourning room, she lived on ‘obstinacy and dry toast’. She was thirty-three but seemed more like a teenager; a modern doctor might diagnose an eating disorder, another kind of dysfunctional consumption, an absolute sensitivity to everything. ‘The truth is I am made of paper and it tears me,’ she said. (A century later, Woolf, who became fascinated by Elizabeth, would claim, ‘Cut me anywhere, and I bled too profusely.’) Her only companion now was Flush, a red cocker spaniel given to her in consolation for Bro’s loss. He was as loyal as Byron’s Boatswain and constantly at her side – save when he was three times snatched in the street by dognappers, and Elizabeth had to brave the terrors of Shoreditch to retrieve him. Perhaps he was Bro reincarnate.

  They looked extraordinarily alike, these two, poet and dog, with their silky ringlets and expressive eyes. She imagined Flush ‘as hairy as Faunus’, and thanked ‘the true PAN, | Who, by low creatures, leads to heights of love’. A century later, in her biography of Flush, Woolf imagined the poet in her bedroom, the dog’s face and bright eyes close to Elizabeth’s: ‘Was she no longer an invalid in Wimpole Street, but a Greek nymph in some dim grove in Arcady?’ But Flush, who had once hunted rabbits in the countryside, was reduced to lying in a patch of light that moved across the carpet as the sun swung over the city, day after day.

  Woolf would claim that years of reclusion had done irreparable harm to Elizabeth as an artist; that she had been somehow maimed. As an invalid she was rendered invalid; like other Victorian women, she responded to constraints with withdrawal. Yet in her immobility she lay open to the world. As Virginia sent her Imagination over the ocean, and as Stephen travelled in his reveries, so Elizabeth reached out of her window like Odin’s ravens to bring back news of the world beyond. ‘Religious hermits, when they care to see visions, do it better they all say, through fasting and flagellation and seclusion in dark places,’ she noted.

  With her morbid intensity – ‘I am Cassandra, you know, and smell the slaughter in the bathroom’ – influenced by her fellow addict, Coleridge, and influencing in turn Edgar Allan Poe (who dedicated ‘The Raven’ to her), Elizabeth became a mythic figure. Confined, she rejected convention; her letters and poems burst with passion and outrage, conjuring up images and visions and self-drama. Restricted by reality, she looked to the other: she became fascinated by the occult, by spiritualism and animal magnetism, while looking like a black-clad Miss Havisham or Kate Bush in a crinoline. In another age she might have stood accused of being a witch, with Flush as her familiar.

  In her bitter poem of 1848, ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’, a strange meeting of New England and the Caribbean, Elizabeth imagined a young black woman standing on the shore of Cape Cod Bay, listening to ‘the ocean’s roar’ and cursing the white land. Raped by a gang of slave-owners, she suffocates her bastard child for its whiteness and evokes vodou lwa: ‘Your fine white angels … sucked the soul of that child of mine.’ There was, as Elizabeth admitted, a ‘deathly odour’ to her work. Its power lay in her protest at modern evils: slavery, child labour, and the enshacklement of her sex. The future seemed to offer only bitterness.

  But on Saturday, 12 September 1846, all her expectations were overturned. Aged forty, she defied her father and secretly married Robert Browning, scion of another slave-owning family, himself part Creole. The following Saturday, Elizabeth snuck out of the house like a teenager with Flush in her arms and her new maid Wilson at her side. She met Browning at a nearby bookshop, then took the five o’clock train from Vauxhall to Southampton. They sailed at nine o’clock that night from the Royal Pier on the South-Western Steam Packet Company’s ‘Splendid and Powerful STEAM SHIP’ to Havre-de-Grâce, ‘main cabin, twenty-one shillings, dogs, five shillings’.

  Robert worried that the evening voyage would present new dangers. On board, Elizabeth and Wilson loosened their stays, enduring every pitch and roll. Flush, too, suffered. Despite his five-shilling ticket he was turned out and treated, well, like a dog, ‘inasmuch as people have a barbarous mania for chaining dogs upon deck all night’. Defiantly, Elizabeth brought him into the cabin, but a woman with six screaming children objected, ‘and delivered him over to the tormentors though he had escaped from them to me for the third time’. Weathering the storm, the exhausted refugees – two newlyweds, one maid and one dog – made it across the Channel. No one came in pursuit. Elizabeth’s father never forgave her; he returned all her letters unopened, even those bordered in black. She was already dead to him.

  As Mrs Browning – an oddly ordinary title, given its extraordinary achievement – this black-clad butterfly would open up in Italy, in the way her heroes had done. It was as if she had been born for this. She basked in the sensual heat, wearing the loosest of gowns. In 1849, aged forty-three, Elizabeth gave birth to a son, whom she called Pen, a neutral name. She would keep his long hair in ringlets and dress him in romantic
clothes, black velvet tunics and breeches, declining to define his gender – ‘If you put him into a coat and waistcoat forthwith he only would look like a small angel travestied’ – and told her brothers not to instruct him in manly ways. As he grew up, Pen came to resemble Bro, too; perhaps that was why Elizabeth disliked the idea of him learning to swim.

  This trio had a faerie, androgynous air about them; even Robert ‘resembled a girl drest in boy’s clothes’, according to Elizabeth’s friend Miss Mitford. ‘He had long ringlets & no neckcloth … Femmelette – is a word made for him.’ Although Elizabeth often appeared pale, both she and Robert were described as having dark complexions: Elizabeth herself said ‘I am small and black.’ William Michael Rossetti said they took up almost no room in a railway carriage, and barely needed a double bed at an inn. All three seemed out of time and space, sex and race. ‘When I look in the glass,’ Elizabeth told a friend, ‘I see nothing but a perfectly white & black face, the eyes being obliterated by large blots of blackness.’ To Nathaniel Hawthorne she was ‘that pale, small person, scarcely embodied at all … her black ringlets cluster down into her neck, and make her face look white by their sable profusion’. Hawthorne, whose interest in the supernatural reached back to the Salem witches whom his own ancestor had tried, regarded her as one might examine an animal or a myth: ‘I could not form any judgement about her age, it may range anywhere within the limits of human or elfin life.’ Meanwhile, the thrice-ransomed Flush ran wild and learned to speak Italian, according to his mistress, and took to the water with ease, having been baptised in the river ‘in Petrarch’s name’.

  Out of Europe’s revolutions came Aurora Leigh, a sprawling poem with its heroine based on Elizabeth, and its hero, Romney Leigh, on her brother. Intended to be ‘intensely modern’, as she believed herself to be, she called it an ‘art-novel’, its power drawing on the same stormy mid-century disruptions that would influence Emily Brontë and Herman Melville. The poem explodes with Promethean myth and Shelleyan imagery. It cites The Tempest, New England utopias and the Irish Famine, and invokes Tahitian queens and Haitian presidents, set next to science-fiction scenes of stars as ‘overburned’ suns, ‘swallowing up | Like wax the azure spaces’. Underlayered by ‘marine sub-transatlantic railroads’ and fossil mastodons, this is a fearsome vision of a brave new world: Elizabeth had heard accounts of Brook Farm from Hawthorne and her American friend Margaret Fuller, although she disapproved of its socialism, saying she’d rather live under Tsarist Russia ‘than in a Fourier-machine, with my individuality sucked out of me by a social air-pump’.

  Hyped-up and heretical, Aurora Leigh fed on the Hungry Forties, as starvation, revolution and disease swept across Europe, defying the industrial, capitalist age. Aurora is accused of writing ‘of factories and of slaves, as if | Your father were a negro, and your son | A spinner in the mills. All’s yours and you, – | All, coloured with your blood, or otherwise | Just nothing to you …’ All the while, the sea flows through the blank verse – ‘the bitter sea | Inexorably pushed between us both’ – with heretical images of shipwreck: ‘… some hard swimming through | The deeps – I lost breath in my soul sometimes | And cried “God save me if there’s any God.”’ In fact, the manuscript of Aurora Leigh was itself nearly lost at sea, going missing as the Brownings sailed to Marseilles, although Elizabeth claimed, flippantly, to be more concerned at the loss of her son’s clothes in the same trunk, ‘all my Penini’s pretty dresses, embroidered trousers, collars, everything I have been collecting to make him look nice in …’

  Her poem may be almost undecipherable now without resort to historical notes, but it had an electrifying effect on her peers. The Pre-Raphaelites worshipped it as an alternative Bible, and saw its author as a kind of patron saint; Ruskin believed it as good as Shakespeare’s sonnets; and his pupil Oscar Wilde declared it ‘much the greatest work in our literature’, ‘simply “intense” in every way’.

  That intensity came out of all those years in her upper room, ‘a sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage’ – a telling image, given that the presiding spirit of Aurora Leigh is an eldritch bird, its spread wings and open beak like Poe’s raven: ‘We are sepulchred alive in this close world,’ Elizabeth wrote. The opium to which she was addicted could induce synaesthesia, bending the senses, hearing colour, seeing music; it once sent me floating down the streets of south-west London by the river, visions flaring out of the brown suburbia around me. But in all her phantasmagoria, Elizabeth remained haunted by the water which had claimed her brother. And in 1850 that memory was stirred up by a new loss and another shipwreck.

  She had met Margaret Fuller in Florence, and the two women became close; Fuller, a Transcendentalist and feminist, inspired the utopian passages in Aurora Leigh. About to sail back to New York with her husband, the Marchese Ossoli, and their young child, Margaret spent her last night with the Brownings. ‘She said with her peculiar smile that “the ship was called the Elizabeth, & she accepted it as a good omen – though a prediction had been made to her husband that the sea wd be fatal to him”.’

  Elizabeth was nearing New York when, weighed down by a cargo of Carrara marble, she foundered in a storm, only a hundred yards off Fire Island. In the early hours of the morning her freight smashed through her sides. As daylight came, the waves ran too high to launch a rescue – although the land sharks had already arrived with carts to salvage the luxuries being washed ashore. ‘At flood-tide, about half past three o’clock, when the ship broke up entirely, they came out of the forecastle, and Margaret sat with her back to the foremast, with her hands on her knees,’ Thoreau reported. ‘A great wave came and washed her aft. The steward had just before taken her child and started for shore. Both were drowned.’ The philosophical receiver of wrecks had been sent by Fuller’s friend, Emerson, to search the shore, but he found neither her body nor the revolutionary manuscripts she’d been carrying; no sodden legacy lying, like Shelley’s notebook or Prospero’s books among the splintered timber and white marble.

  Elizabeth received this news having suffered the last and most nearly fatal of four miscarriages. Her reaction was typically intense: ‘In sight of shore, of the home, American shore! Oh Great God, how terrible are Thy judgements! The whole associations have been more poignant to me that by a like tragedy I lost once the happiness of my life … the life of my life … the colour & fragrance of my soul.’ The sea had now taken three people from her – Shelley, Bro and Fuller – ‘the sea, that blue end of the world, | That fair scroll finis of a wicked book’.

  Yet at the last, this fragile, resilient woman may have been reconciled to the waves. In 1858, three years before she died, Elizabeth went back to Le Havre. ‘We have come here to dip me in warm sea-water,’ she wrote, ‘for I have been very weak and unwell of late.’ While her husband and son swam every day, she was plunged for five minutes at a time into a hip-bath filled with salt water. She could barely get to the sea itself, let alone look at it. But then Robert found ‘a hole I can creep through to the very shore, without walking many yards … and the sea is open and satisfactory’. It might have washed away her grief. ‘We bathe & get strength, & sit close to the sea watching the animated ships & the swimming men & women.’ Even her son had become a water baby. ‘Peni bathes everyday & has learned to swim & swims, & looks like a merman, with his locks floating …’ In the warmth of the sun, looking back over the Channel, there was a sense of healing and a life yet to come.

  Three years later, floating on her own opium cloud, Elizabeth opened her eyes in the hour before dawn and told Robert, ‘You did right not to wait – what a fine steamer – how comfortable,’ as if she were back in Torquay, before Bro left her; as though, like Thoreau, she were sailing away.

  Moments later, she breathed her last word, ‘Beautiful.’

  Early in the morning, before anyone is up and about, I leave my Torquay guest house for the harbour. I ride along the promenade, past the bandstand where I ate fish and chips last night as couples in deckchairs l
istened to a brass band while boys skateboarded round the park. I cycle up the hill, past the bird compound, its inmates held under a vast net suspended high over the headland, just as Melville described the rigging of a slaveship as ‘hung overhead like three ruinous aviaries’. Facing the black canopy, where the birds circle as if caught underwater, is the house where Elizabeth waited for her brother in her own captivity.

  Unsettled by a glimpsed scene I would decline to pay for, I leave the avian prison and carry on, past Beacon Cove and the hotel where Stephen Tennant once stayed, half-believing that he was back in his beloved south of France. The sea is deep and turquoise. In silent black and white, a thirteen-year-old girl walks out of Morgan’s painting, climbs the rock and leaps into the void, her body curving as if, for a moment, she might fly upward to the sun rather than plunging down into the waves below. The inter-titles record her feat.

  She springs forward, like a bird taking wing, and seems to hover.

  Then, she dives amidst a splashing of luminous drops of water.

  I ride on, ignoring the girl in the water. The road rises to another headland, where a house appears to be built into the cliff; its wooden balcony looks out to sea like a crow’s nest. It was here, in a room named Wonderland, that Wilde composed the letters which would send him to a prison cell.

  In 1878 Babbacombe Cliff was rebuilt for Georgiana Mount-Temple, aristocratic patron of the Pre-Raphaelites and confidante of Ruskin, whom she introduced to spiritualism; she employed her own mediums to communicate with the dead and was caricatured in Woolf’s Freshwater as Lady Raven Mount-Temple. Her statue still stands nearby; fresh flowers regularly appear in its bronze hands, placed there by admirers of her championship of animal rights. In 1892 Georgiana lent the house to her cousin, Constance Wilde, so that she and Oscar could escape London for the winter. As dramatic as Babbacombe Cliff was from the outside, its interior was even more remarkable. It was hung with paintings by Rossetti, tiled by Morris and lit by stained-glass windows by Burne-Jones. This secular chapel was a fitting place from which Wilde would order his veiled Salome to be bound in Tyrian purple and lettered in tired silver. And although Oscar complained to his friend Robbie Ross, ‘Are there beautiful people in London? Here there are none; everyone is so unfinished,’ the sea offered him a sense of escape.