Charlotte Mew

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Charlotte felt the shock partly through Ella (who was in the Channel Islands at the time, trying to save money) but also through her friends the Millards. In February Evelyn Millard had opened at the St James’s as Cecily Cardew in The Importance of Being Earnest. In April, after Wilde had been arrested, the management took his name off the programmes and the front of the theatre, and the run was cut short. The curious and pathetic side of Charlotte which felt even the faintest breath of scandal as a threat told her that she must have nothing more to do with The Yellow Book, even in its more sober form, or even with Harland and his million things to say. She was mistaken, because The Yellow Book circle was the one that suited her best, perhaps the only one, except for her own family, where she ever felt not at odds. After she left the Chief she did not find anyone to encourage her with the same whole-heartedness for another seventeen years. What was more, the break she had made was not complete, because she was in love with Ella D’Arcy.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Nunhead and St Gildas

  FOR A YEAR OR SO Charlotte had been in demand, always getting dressed to go and meet someone or other. Now she had serious duties at home. Poor Fred Mew showed no signs of getting any new commissions, and if he had he couldn’t have undertaken them. By the end of the nineties he was very ill; the doctor diagnosed cancer of the stomach. He died on 13 September 1898, of cancer and extreme exhaustion. The certificate shows that Charlotte was with him at the end, and witnessed the death. By and large, he had not had much of a life of it. He had dropped out of his profession to such an extent that The Builder did not even print a memorial note until the following year.

  Fred Mew left about £2000 in all. Anna Maria’s contention was, as it always had been, that she had been betrayed and ill-treated, but that at all costs she must stay in Gordon Street, or her last hope of respectability would be gone. On the other hand, they could scarcely afford it. Fred, as was now quite clear, had been paying the rent and the bills out of capital. From Anna Maria’s inheritance an annuity of £300 a year came in, but from that the Mews had Henry and Freda and their private nurses to support, as well as themselves.

  Charlotte, taking charge, wrote to Walter Barnes Mew, and put it to him that her mother must not be separated from ‘the few friends she has left to her’; and although Walter can’t much have liked the implied criticism of his uncle, he was ready to give what help he could. Charlotte’s idea was the last resort, which at all costs must be concealed from the world at large; lodgers. She had calculated that they could ask £100 p.a. for the six rooms on the two top floors and ‘use of bathroom’. To find a tenant who would be unobtrusive enough to suit them she was looking for a good house-agent. As soon as she found one she wanted Walter to ‘speak’ to him. He also had to ‘speak’ to the Registrar, who had put ‘Maw’ instead of ‘Mew’ on the certificate, as though poor Fred had lost, in the end, even his own name.

  The matter of men having to do the speaking divided Miss Lotti once again from the buoyant new Women, who did their own speaking for themselves and no longer felt a deep shame in letting off part of the house. Only a little while later Vanessa and Virginia Stephen divided up 46 Gordon Square, just round the corner from Gordon Street, into a kind of intellectual rooming-house, while in Doughty Street, the Mews’ old home, both men and women were moving into the Havelock Ellises’ communal house, the fellowship of the New Life. These hints of the coming twentieth century meant nothing to Charlotte and Anne, who were only concerned to see that their mother should have nothing to do with actually collecting the rent, and so would be spared as much as possible of the terrible humiliation. A long-term tenant, a widow, Mrs Caroline Gordon Lennox McHardy, moved in, and some arrangement must have been come to about the front stairs, on which she must never be met.

  There were further possibilities. Anne might undertake small commissions at home, say screen-painting or furniture-painting of anything that, in 1900, needed to be decorated with birds and wreaths of flowers. Charlotte wrote (22nd June) to their landlords, the trustees of the Bedford Estate, to ask if they would grant permission for a studio to be built in the small piece of garden behind the house. She very sensibly thought it best not to make it clear how she and Anne proposed to make use of this studio, simply pointing out that they had been left in ‘much reduced circumstances’ by their father’s death, and that with the help of friends (names not given) they believed they could increase the value of the property. If the studio was built, she hoped the trustees would see their way to extending the lease.

  The trustees replied on the 25th June that they would have to see the plans and specifications of anything the Mews intended to build, but under no circumstances would they consider extending the lease. As they no doubt calculated, nothing more was heard of the studio, and Anne, for the time being, continued to paint in her own room. She was also employed for a few hours every week at a ladylike – meaning badly paid – job with a guild of decorative artists. At the same time Charlotte began to place her work with another magazine, a monthly, Temple Bar; she had been recommended to it by a friend, Mrs Clement Parsons, who was a writer herself on educational subjects.

  Temple Bar had been going since 1860, but its great days, if it had ever had any, had long been over. In its dull pink binding, with a forbidding print of the old Temple Bar, it made little attempt at either popular or aesthetic appeal. It had no illustrations, and was so closely printed that the readers must have risked eyestrain with each successive number. By the 1890s it was being passed from one editor to another. None of them had Henry Harland’s flair, nor did they need it to put Temple Bar together. The fiction’s main support was Maarten Maartens (Joost Marins Van der Poorten Schwartz) who wrote reliable tales on solid Dutch subjects. Strong digestions from the readership were needed for the dry masses of information in the feature pages, and the editor may well have been surprised to get in anything as lively and passionate as The China Bowl. Charlotte’s story appeared in two parts in the September and October of 1899. After this, she became a regular contributor. But she must have missed Harland, and even more so when she wrote The Governess in Fiction, a somewhat tired little piece which she sent to The Academy. The Academy’s editor cut her article down and altered it, and all she could afford to do was to refuse to let it appear over her own name and to sign it simply M.

  It was a cautious start into the new century, from which so much was expected, and which was majestically marked by the passing of the old Queen. For everyone who could afford them, there were hopes. From the anxious edge of the professional and artistic world Charlotte got her view of the gospels of Life and Joy, the new call to the open road (‘going I know not where’), the commitment to self-purification and vegetarian diets, to the City Beautiful and to youth, energy, humanity and fresh air. Lucy Harrison herself, calling on poetry to open the soul’s windows, had guided her classes in the same direction; so had The Yellow Book women with their latchkeys and bicycles. Charlotte, just turned thirty, tried to prepare herself to be carried forward or, if necessary, to be left behind. Her face at this time took on its habitual curious expression, with her strong eyebrows raised in a perpetual half-moon, as though she had just heard a joke, or perhaps thought that if life is a joke it is not a very good one.

  On the 22nd of March 1901 Henry Herne Mew died of pneumonia in the Peckham Hospital. He was thirty-five, and was registered as having ‘no occupation or calling’. Charlotte made arrangements for the funeral in the nearby Nunhead Cemetery. For the second time her elder brother was lost, but this time much more terribly. She had come to terms with Henry’s madness, but not with the idea of his dying mad.

  ‘Her fears began with her brother’s death. He had the same trouble as Freda. She was profoundly unhappy for many years.’ This comment on Charlotte was from Professor A. G. Tansley, who married her old school friend Elsie Chick. Like most of her friends’ husbands, he seems to have been half-fascinated, half-distressed by Charlotte. He was wrong in thinking that her �
�fears’ began in 1901, but right in guessing what the grim little private funeral meant to her.

  It is the clay that makes the earth stick to his spade;

  He fills in holes like this year after year;

  The others have gone; they were tired, and half-afraid,

  But I would rather be standing here;

  In In Nunhead Cemetery, which Charlotte wrote (like the asylum poems) ten years or more after the event, the elements of the real situation shift and re-arrange themselves, while the pity remains. The speaker here is a young man, most likely a city clerk, whose life has been totally transformed by his love for a girl. Before he met her he was a ‘cheap, stale chap’, but with her anything seemed possible; they didn’t even mind the long wait before they could afford to get married, they walked about London together and were able to laugh ‘like children’. Now she is dead, the funeral is over, he is standing in the cemetery which he has seen time and again from the windows of the train, without thinking twice about it. The trains are still rattling past. As for children, the very idea of them nauseates him.

  One of the children hanging about

  Pointed at the whole dreadful heap and smiled

  This morning, after that was carried out;

  There is something terrible about a child.

  The last fifty-four lines of the poem, Charlotte explained, were written first, and show ‘the gradual lapse into insanity’ as the clerk stands in the rain by the raw graveside.

  Now I will burn you back, I will burn you through,

  Though I am damned for it, we two will lie

  And burn –

  Sexual frustration can hardly be distinguished from fear as the twilight thickens: ‘I am scared, I am staying with you to-night. Put me to sleep.’ At last he has to admit that he has been cheated by Death in the shape of the Nunhead gravedigger. But if this man would only set about digging up all the mounds of rotting flowers, as he has it in his power to do, we should be able to see the faces of the dead again; and they might, after all, be alive.

  In Nunhead Cemetery is a good example of Charlotte Mew’s longer poems, giving ‘the essence, never the solution of an idea … a psychological study that would have made a full six shilling novel if written by a novelist’. Her psychological study here, the speaker, that is, with whom she shows such ready sympathy, is the thirty-bob-a-weeker who appears so often in the period’s fiction. He had been the hero (if he can ever be called that) of Ella’s Irremediable, but he is also Kipling’s young chemist’s assistant possessed by the spirit of John Keats, and Forster’s Leonard Bast, struggling to educate himself, and the ‘pale bespectacled face’ Edward Thomas described at the office window. Very few of these dreamers, beyond Wells’s Kipps, ever get free from the desk and the counter, to finish up alive with the right woman. To aim so high seems to be destructive in itself.

  But Charlotte Mew does more than pity the ‘cheap, stale chap’. She makes it clear that he is horribly aware of what has happened, but not of all his own motives, particularly his anger at the injustice done him after he has waited so long, and with such restraint. ‘You never kissed me back.’ He confuses the grave with her bed. The poem isn’t about her suffering, but his own loss. That cannot be borne, and so there follows the ‘lapse into insanity’.

  It was felt, after Henry’s death, that Charlotte ought to get away for a holiday. Her friends watched her changes of mood anxiously, though, to do her justice, she never asked them to, and was often taken aback by their kindness. In the June of 1901 they got together a party for a seaside holiday in Brittany. The convent of St Gildas de Rhuys, on the gulf of Morbihan, took in summer visitors, and they booked rooms there.

  According to Charlotte’s account the party consisted of ‘six unmated females’, all thirtyish, and all old school friends – a Botanist, a Zoologist, a Bacteriologist, a Vocalist, a Humorist and a Dilettante. The English party presented ‘a bold unchaperoned front’ although a very different one from The Yellow Book women as they swooped untamed into Harland’s villa in Dieppe. They had sixteen pieces of luggage between them. The Botanist was Edith Oliver, who had helped her father revise his official handbook to the Kew Gardens Museum. The Zoologist was Maggie Browne, the Vocalist was Florence Hughes, daughter of the painter Arthur Hughes, the Bacteriologist was Margaret Chick, the Dilettante was Anne (a painter without a studio), and Charlotte was, as she always had been at the Gower Street School, the Humorist. In the days when they had walked from Hampstead to Bloomsbury and back, she had ‘carried on’ and made the way seem short. Now, as they started out, she seemed in excellent spirits. Although they had a bad crossing she danced a can-can for them in the cabin, in her boots and silk directoire knickers. And no-one could dance as well as Charlotte, when she felt like it.

  Charlotte’s Notes in a Brittany Convent appeared in Temple Bar (October 1901). It starts out in the approved lady journalist’s style – stormy weather at Southampton, demanding cab-drivers at St Malo, ‘spavined nags’ (although there was no real reason for them to be any more spavined in France than in England), late arrival at the convent, which, they know, would be shut by nine o’clock.

  Thus we were rattled in procession through the grey, curious town like travellers in a dream, to be deposited opposite an unknown inn, in a dark street on the outskirts, into which hostelry our Jehu disappeared to have his supper … till the exasperated Botanist at length dashed in, and snatched the supping tyrant from his meal. Finally we jolted off, a huddled heap beneath a pyramid of oscillating trunks. After many stoppages, at some belated hour we drew up, got out and propped ourselves in an exhausted line against the convent wall. The great bell resounded with a startling clangour through the sleeping village. Two bright eyes and one soft voice behind a little grille at length examined us, and from our incoherent explanations rapidly concluded: ‘Ah, les demoiselles anglaises!’ Who else, indeed, could such drôles be?

  The heavy gates clanked open, and our weird chaise clattered in; our cocher stacked our baggage in the sanctum of the little portress, who directed us to burrow for our nightgowns. Then with her lantern they led us across a courtyard and a stretch of garden, on through silent corridors, and paused: ‘Vos chambres,’ said she, and vanished like an apparition. Whitewashed walls, a crucifix, a bed, a paradise in miniature! We staggered in, shut doors, and slept.

  This is exactly what Temple Bar’s readers would expect. The French, they knew, are funny and untrustworthy, though controllable by anyone who is English and firm enough. At the same time the French language has a seductive effect which makes the writer put drôles, cocher, etc. far too often, and this gets worse and worse as the piece goes on. Again, there is something exotic about the heavy gates of the convent, and the ‘soft voice and bright eyes’ of the little portress suggest the wrong and un-English sacrifice of womanhood which the nuns are making in the name of religion. But their kindness and tranquillity, what about those? The unmated females are the champions of normality, putting up a good front against nonsense, but in a few days they are won over by a romantic and even sentimental vision of the whitecapped sisters. The church itself they still disapprove of sharply. A ‘fat, damp, fatherly priest’ who tries to convert them is easily routed, and a seminarist forgets his vows and listens dreamily to Florence Hughes singing ‘Night of June’ at the piano. This serves the priest and the seminarist right, but does not explain away the nuns, who have the tranquillity of the sunshine ‘which suspends the breath of question’. Charlotte herself went to mass every day, and was uneasily impressed by the amount of work that had to be done in the convent to keep the holidaymakers going – washing, cooking, farm work, which would be even harder in winter. ‘And then the winter sewing in the chill, dim rooms, where the high windows show a line of sea, or merely a grey patch of cloud cut by the cemetery crucifix, which stands out black against the sky.’

  It is difficult to get a clear idea of Charlotte’s religious position, and still more of her religious experience, at this point
in her life. Her Isle of Wight cousin, Ellen Mary (who by this time had entered a convent), believed that Charlotte would have become a Roman Catholic if it hadn’t been for the sacrament of confession. She could not bring herself to that. What is certain is that she had always had a devotion to the crucified, and a painful physical apprehension of the cross. ‘He was alive to me, so hurt, so hurt!’ But, as in everything else, she veered wildly from one position to another. In many people with divided natures the two selves, although they seem to be at odds, are really only surprised by each other, and even, as it were, congratulating each other. That was not so with Charlotte Mew, who always felt the wastefulness of conflict. Sometimes she blamed God for His negligence in not existing. At times she begged for peace at all costs, ‘too sound for waking and for dreams too deep’, sometimes she wanted, like Heine, to cling to this earth which, after all, is the best we can hope for. But unlike Heine she could not feel justified in this, or justified at all. She protested against suffering, but not against judgement. Her prayer, just as it was when she walked across the fields, as a small child, to Barton Church, was ‘have mercy on us’.

  The expedition to Brittany brought out the double nature and even the double-dealer in Charlotte. As the party’s humorist, she was a success. There was, for example, a fellow-guest who could be heard praying loudly every night for the souls of ‘the English party’. Charlotte did a good imitation of this woman. There were other ‘coarse sallies’, which upset the seminarist. These high spirits were just what her friends had hoped for. But there was something that escaped them. ‘She could seem so gay and utterly without care that a friend of hers described her thus on a convent holiday in France, although all the time she was experiencing the great joy of being abroad she was writing letters to other friends recounting the misery and discontent she felt away from her normal surroundings.’ From this time onwards she was usually careful to present edited versions of herself to those who were fond of her. This, I suppose, is not really double-dealing.