During the autumn and winter of 1901 Charlotte was under what she herself admitted was ‘rather high pressure’. This pressure was then called ‘nerves’ (Edith Oliver called them ‘the blues’) and the advice given was usually to avoid morbid thoughts, and to pull oneself together. This was particularly necessary for ‘unmated females’. In the spring of 1901 Elsie Millard, the most amusing of Charlotte’s friends, got married, though not, as it happened, to anyone very amusing. She had chosen an Irish civil servant, James O’Keefe, who worked in the Treasury, and in his spare time edited old Irish texts. It was a Roman Catholic wedding with a bright, noisy child bridesmaid, Vivien Haigh-Wood (who grew up to be the first wife of T. S. Eliot). Charlotte must surely have had the same feelings as any other woman of thirty-two when her friends begin to settle down. Edith Oliver was still living at home in Kew, serenely occupied as a social worker and as deputy organist of St Mark’s Church. Maggie Browne was never likely to change much, but two of the Chick girls were married by now, leaving only the eldest, Margaret, to write faithfully to the Mews. The Yellow Book women, of course, were survivors, although Henry Harland and Beardsley were in their graves. But they had swept ahead in new directions, and Charlotte was no longer in step.
She set herself to work in a less haphazard way than usual, and placed her study of the old dressmaker, Miss Bolt, in Temple Bar, as well as the Notes in a Brittany Convent. In September she appeared for the first time in the Pall Mall Magazine, edited by Frederic Greenwood, with Some Ways of Love. This was a society romance, in the manner of Paul Bourget (‘“And so you send me away unanswered,” said the young man, rising reluctantly and taking his gloves from the table’). It shows, at least, a determined attempt to be professional, and also the course of Charlotte’s thoughts. The heroine, who teaches the hero that there are many ways of love, is called Ella.
Ella D’Arcy was still in Paris. In the ordinary way Charlotte could hardly have afforded to go abroad again so soon, but early in 1902 the finances at 9 Gordon Street improved a little. Mary Kendall, the Brighton aunt, died, leaving her household furniture and jewellery to Anna Maria; another trust was set up for Edward Herne Kendall, who was never likely to be able to provide for himself, and the rest of the estate, invested in two small house properties, went to Charlotte and Anne. This meant about £20 a year more for each of them, and (though they had been fond of their aunt) it must have given them a sensation of freedom. Charlotte at once set off for Paris.
Apart from her own family she seems to have told no-one but Edith Oliver, though Elsie, she wrote to Edith, ‘understands’. And the quiet Edith, for her part, seems to have made no comment, but lent Charlotte a spirit-stove for making tea, of the kind then used by English ladies travelling abroad.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Rue Chateaubriand
SINCE the early Yellow Book days Ella had fallen on lean times. She was getting on for forty, and hard up as always – ‘I do care for money,’ she said, ‘having none’ – and she had greatly overestimated her power over her publisher, John Lane. Lane was, of course, hung about with female authors, but Ella had always been attractive to men and gambled on holding him. It is sad to think of a rash and generous nature like hers reduced to such straits.
When Lane sailed for America in 1895 Ella had hoped to see him off at Euston, ‘but no-one invited me to do so’, she wrote to him, ‘and I hadn’t the cheek to come unasked’. She could send him letters, however. About the Oscar Wilde scandal she wrote surprisingly little – ‘various little contretemps have arisen’, as she put it – but stuck to her main point. ‘Of course you won’t answer this letter – you are Napoleonic even in trifles – so I don’t ask you to do so; but I think it a pity you didn’t take me with you as secretary, for then I could have answered it for you, couldn’t I?’ Her Monochromes in Lane’s Keynotes had had more quality than almost anything else in the series; he knew she could write, and shouldn’t have been deaf to her appeals. Scarcely able to pay her way, she flitted from one boarding-house to another, at one point lodging with a Spanish count who, she said, had reduced her meals to bread and water, and threatened to knock off the bread. Lane seems to have owed her small sums of money – small to him, but not to her – and he had the copyright of ‘a brutal portrait of me by Wilson Steer’ which he refused to destroy. She could never trust him. He would be expected and not turn up, or come, but leave by an early train. Ella had more than enough experience to recognize a man on the run, but she could not give up. ‘That I ever dined with my publisher at the Crawford Hotel seems like a bygone dream,’ she wrote. She was still good-looking, and had plenty to offer, but Lane, for the sake of peace, preferred to do without it. In 1898 he settled the question by marrying a wealthy American widow.
This new wife, as it happened, was interested, and interested Lane, in translations from the French, which were Ella’s speciality. But Ella made no further appeals. She had wanted Lane, and hadn’t got him. With her usual stoicism she accepted this, and left London for Paris. In 1902 she was still there, still broke (she reckoned to be able to live on £90 a year, but rarely had it) and was in danger of falling into the melancholy inertia which always lay in wait for her. She knew a number of French writers and publishers, and sometimes got a little literary work, but she was capable of sitting for hours over a book at a café table, or staying all day in bed. A French bed, because she had always said you couldn’t find a decent one in England.
Charlotte, who seems to have been expected, arrived in Paris in April, but did not date her first letter to Edith Oliver beyond ‘Thursday: 1 p.m.’. There is an atmosphere of uncontrolled excitement. Nothing could be more unlike the Notes in a Brittany Convent. In Brittany Charlotte (according to her own account) had been talking calmly, in fluent French, to the sisters, asking them the secret of tranquillity. Now it turns out that her French was so poor that she couldn’t be understood when she asked the way. She had never been to Paris, had never been abroad by herself before, didn’t know where to go first, was dazzled by the lights and in danger of being run over by motor-cars and the French two-decker steam trams. She was supposed to be sightseeing. It was the Paris of the Expo, with new pavilions, new Guimard-style entrances to the Metros, and all the illuminations stepped up to give a dazzling enchantment to the violet evening sky. Charlotte, though she normally had a sharp eye for colour and architecture, noticed very little of all this. She was in a state of passionate agitation. ‘My dear, I scarcely know where to begin and start at random,’ she wrote to Edith. She was beyond doing justice even to Notre Dame. ‘My head was stupid and my eyes livid – I couldn’t look up.’
For some reason she had booked into a pension at 26 rue de Turin, which was then a noisy business quarter. However, she had a room with a balcony, and was able not to take notice of the other pensionnaires, which was exactly what she wanted. The arrangement was that she should take her meals at Ella’s place in rue Chateaubriand, about half-an-hour’s walk away. It would, surely, have been more convenient to find somewhere nearer, but it was typical of Charlotte that she had to hold herself, at first, at a distance. ‘Up to now I have had no impressions or sensations worth recording – perhaps I have worn them all out – and then I have been living at rather high pressure but physically I am better – mentally still tired – but if I wished to get my nerves under control, I have done it – and hope that it will last. I can’t transport my thoughts to England and the things left behind with any sense of reality – and perhaps it is better so – but it makes me seem very egotistic – which I’m not really – it is a queer uncertain mind this of mine – and claims are being made on it at the moment which I find difficult to meet.’ The claims on her mind were being made by her body, and Ella, although she took other people’s behaviour easily enough, must have been somewhat puzzled. In the morning, when they were supposed to meet at Parc Monceau, half-way between the two pensions, Charlotte suddenly defaulted. ‘E. D’A wished me to meet her but as it was wet I did not feel incline
d – and waiting for a break started off by myself in the direction … and prowled about the Quartier Latin.’ In her jacket, collar and tie she must have looked like a tiny, rather out-of-date lionne among the large hats and sumptuous fashions at the Expo. But her courage only went so far and no further. In this Paris of 1902, where lesbians met by mutual understanding at the Chat Noir, where Willy had already published Colette’s Claudine à l’Ecole, and in rue Georges-Ville the Marquise de Belboeuf, dressed in mechanic’s overalls, reigned mildly over her circle as ‘Missy’, Charlotte could not summon up the nerve to go into a café by herself. She looked for a crêmerie, and as she couldn’t find one she went without her chocolate for that day.
To maintain her independence she needed to feel that she had come to Paris to help Ella. This was an insurance against loss of self-respect, if not against unhappiness. ‘I found E. D’A somewhat in need of someone to look after her,’ she told Edith. ‘The details I am not free to enter into.’ Ella was probably between lovers; certainly she needed to pull herself together to receive Caroline Grout, Flaubert’s niece, who wished to discuss the translation of her Souvenirs Intimes. Ella’s room was in a mess, and she had made no preparation of any kind. Charlotte hurried out to buy ‘the little necessaries for the occasion – flowers – cakes – & c. – and we arranged the room (one lives in one’s bedroom here and hers is a very charming one).’ Ella, of course, asked her to stay and meet Mme Grout, but Charlotte once again suddenly retreated. ‘As I was timid I didn’t stay to see the lady but came back here – and then found myself too restless to keep quiet and went for a walk till about 5 when I dressed for dinner and started off again in pouring rain.’ Passionately interested as she was in Flaubert, Charlotte would have liked above all things to meet this favourite niece who was at work on an edition of the letters he had written to her since childhood, yet she threw away the chance when it was offered from a morbid fear of being one too many. A few hours later she was back in rue Chateaubriand, smoking one cigarette after another over a wood-fire which Ella made the concierge light in her room. (Wherever she lived and whatever she did, the concierges always put themselves out for Ella.) And then ‘I saw E. D’A was rather done up and came home along the Champs Elysées looking wonderful with innumerable lights and nearly lost my way coming home as it is difficult to see the names of the streets at night – the omnibus men either cannot or will not help you. They are very surly – sometimes one finds a pleasant work-girl who directs you – very kindly – but my French is so bad – it’s not easy to understand or to make oneself understood. This afternoon I shall take it easy – and not go to the rue Chat perhaps till dinner though Ella will wonder where I am as I promised to turn up for déjeuner.’ One more attempt to show to herself, and to Edith Oliver, and above all to Ella, that she could take it or leave it, and was at no-one’s disposition. But how much did Ella care, or even notice? She was not homoerotic, and had none of Charlotte’s self-tormenting, self-doubting temperament, over-anxious to give, but too nervous to receive. As her letters to John Lane show, Ella went straight for what she wanted and shrugged off the consequences. She was not likely to understand in Charlotte the nervous lover’s painful superstition or perversion which backs away from what it most wants. In any case, it was a losing battle. By the end of the week Charlotte had to turn out of her room in rue de Turin and asked for all letters to be forwarded to her at rue Chateaubriand.
After this the letters stop short, or more likely were destroyed by Edith, who cannot have approved of the way things were going. Ten years later, when Charlotte fell in love again with yet more humiliating results, she repeated almost exactly the same pattern – the wild dash, the hungry need to offer help, the withdrawal, the embarrassment, and the pathetic attempt not to commit herself. In both cases, whatever she had to offer was rejected.
When Charlotte left Paris, she felt as though she had been spat upon. She had made a fool of herself, but she had acted from the heart, without calculation as to what kind of woman Ella was, though that was not hard to find out. Thirty years later, to be sure, Ella, as an old woman with hair dyed ‘a dreadful red orange’ was said to look ‘a little masculine’, but in 1902 she was patently a warm-blooded, clever, unreliable man’s woman, too generous, and in the end too lazy, to take much advantage of men. And easy-going as she was, she didn’t want anything as inconvenient, or, perhaps, as absurd, as Charlotte’s love. The point was put as kindly as she knew how. ‘Ella once said to me, “One acts foolishly in order to write wisely – non è vero?’”
Whether this advice was sound or not, Charlotte’s Paris poems are not wisely written. Le Sacré-Coeur (‘Dear Paris of the hot white hands, the scarlet lips, the scented hair’) is keyed up to hysterical pitch, so is Monsieur Qui Passe – Quai Voltaire. But on all the impulses which were frustrated or done to death in her, she wrote a lyrical epitaph.
I remember rooms that have had their part
In the steady slowing down of the heart.
The room in Paris, the room at Geneva,
The little damp room with the seaweed smell
And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide –
Rooms where for good or for ill, things died.
Charlotte had told Edith that she had no idea how long she would be away, she might be back in a week. In the event she seems to have stayed long enough to improve her French a good deal, but she could not leave Anne for week after week with the responsibility of Anna Maria. By June she was back in 9 Gordon Street. Ella continued to write, whenever a fit for letter-writing took her. But there is no record that she ever met Charlotte again.
CHAPTER NINE
The Quiet House
When we were children Old Nurse used to say,
The house was like an auction or a fair
Until the lot of us were safe in bed.
It has been quiet as the countryside
Since Ted and Janey and then Mother died
And Tom crossed Father and was sent away.
After the lawsuit he could not hold up his head,
Poor Father, and he does not care
For people here, or to go anywhere.
To get away to Aunt’s for that week-end
Was hard enough; (since then, a year ago,
He scarcely lets me slip out of his sight – )
At first I did not like my cousin’s friend,
I did not think I should remember him:
His voice has gone, his face is growing dim
And if I like him now I do not know.
He frightened me before he smiled –
He did not ask me if he might –
He said that he would come one Sunday night,
He spoke to me as if I were a child.
The Quiet House (these are the first two verses) was written in 1913 and out of all her poems was, Charlotte said, ‘to me the most subjective of the lot’. The transpositions here from her own life are as strange, but just as readily understandable, as In Nunhead Cemetery. Once again the story has to be made out from the fits and starts of a sick mind confessing to itself. In verse 1 Elizabeth Goodman appears almost unchanged, saying the things that ‘Old Nurse used to say’. The mother, not the father, has died, and the father, not the mother sits at home and is pitied for his disgrace. The brother and sister are dead, the elder brother is lost, but whatever he has done is his own fault, and he is blamed for being ‘sent away’. There is no role in this story (or in any of Charlotte’s poems) for Anne. The speaker is left alone in the house with her father and the shut room ‘where Mother died’. During her one escape to her aunt’s she has had an experience for which nothing had prepared her. ‘At first I did not like my cousin’s friend.’ And in fact the incident meant nothing, the cousin’s friend treated her like a child, and his promise to call on her meant nothing either. But as the empty months pass it has become an obsession with her. ‘Everything has burned, and not quite through.’ The guilt of wanting and not being wanted is so intense that t
he house itself seems to accuse her. The red light through the stained-glass window on the staircase landing seems to accuse her, or perhaps to wound her, ‘as if, coming down, you had spilt your life’. This is a child’s fantasy, not an adult’s, a regression which Charlotte Mew always shows as the borderline of insanity.
Cumberland Market, n.w.1, near Gordon Square. Charlotte Mew’s ‘Hay-market.’
‘It is a place of carts and the sky … on the map you will find it very small, though it is more important than Piccadilly; it is in the real world.’
The things that kill us seem
Blind to the death they give:
It is only in our dream
The things that kill us live.
There are two sorts of things, then – more usually called two sorts of people – who ‘kill’; those who destroy us quite casually, without even seeing what they’re doing, and those whom we loved but who are dead or mad, and can come back to us as they were only in dreams.
In The Quiet House these are daytime thoughts. In the early evening comes the perpetually hopeful and exciting time, l’heure bleue, represented in autumn Bloomsbury by fog and drizzle. The front-door bell rings, the servant comes up from the basement to answer it, but there is nothing to hope for.
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