To-night I heard a bell again –
Outside it was the same mist of fine rain,
The lamps just lighted down the long, dim street,
No one for me –
I think it is myself I go to meet:
I do not care; some day I shall not think; I shall not be!
Without doubt Charlotte was living from day to day à rebours, in the dark thrill of her own sexuality and the frustration she had inflicted on herself. For this condition there was no hope of peace, except in total extinction. But ‘life goes on the same outside’. Gordon Street was, in fact, not particularly quiet at all – the gates which Cubitt had installed at one end to keep out ‘omnibuses and low persons’ were no longer effective against traffic, and Charlotte complains in one of her letters of emerging from ‘the noise of Gordon Street’ as though stunned. But inside the quiet house life circulated slowly, as though stagnant. Preserved on her invalid’s sofa by her daughters’ loyalty and care, Anna Maria had shrivelled away even further and was addressed by both of them as ‘Ma’. The Mews now had only one maid-of-all-work, Jane Elnswick; she was the last girl to be trained by Elizabeth Goodman, but very different in character, a cheerful resilient Londoner. Jane and Charlotte between them somehow got through everything that had to be done. The house, in those days, dictated its own terms in a kind of conspiracy with the seasons. It ‘made work’. In summer it demanded different curtains and floral chintz covers, while the soot-darkened winter ones were washed and put away. In winter the ‘brights’ needed daily polishing to counteract the fog, and together with the doorstep (which needed whitening) and the fireplaces (which needed blackening), they represented woman’s hard-won triumph over nature. Charlotte always represented herself and Jane at work as a kind of Quixote and Sancho Panza. Once when they were making the beds together she looked out of the window at the plane trees in Gordon Square and observed that it was nearly summer, to which Jane replied that was a good thing as the kippers were much better in warm weather, fatter and oilier. When Charlotte sat down at her desk Jane, pitying her, as the brisk and efficient always pity a writer, came in frequently to ask whether she should finish up the rice pudding for her dinner, and should she run out to the shops, or would Miss Lotti mind going out herself? All this was to keep the young mistress on the go and take her mind off all this reading and scribbling.
Perhaps partly to satisfy Jane, Charlotte began to do some voluntary social work for Miss Paget’s Girls’ Club, at 26 Cartwright Gardens, a few streets away from home. The object of the whole Federation of Working Girls’ Clubs, founded under the auspices of the YMCA, was to train the homemakers of the future on a missionary basis, since ‘no nation can permanently rise above the level of its womanhood’, and some centres promoted the Snowdrop Bands, which encouraged purity and discouraged the wrong kind of conversation. The Federation’s handbooks, however, emphasized the danger of ‘emphasization of personality with young and impressionable natures’ and ‘the subtle temptation in the leader’s heart to rejoice in her power and to draw closer round her a following of girls’. In club language, the girls tended to get a crush on their ‘ladies’, so that Charlotte, with her magnetic appeal for some young women (while she made others uncomfortable), was warned from the start from exerting all her power. But as an excellent pianist and, for that matter, a good dancer, she could be of great use to Miss Paget, who was opening several more clubs in the St Pancras area. She also did district visiting, sorting out troubles with doctor’s and oculist’s prescriptions, and rent arrears. Gratitude was not what she was looking for; she was delighted to recognize the defiant spirit of Miss Bolt among the crowded poor families who were supposed to be pleased to see her when she came. Once, when she was asking for directions, the ground-floor tenant shouted up to the top, ‘Tell the lady upstairs there’s a person here who wants to see her.’ This was a shock for Miss Lotti, but Charlotte was delighted.
Although she continued to send in something every month or so to Temple Bar, Charlotte seemed, since her visit to Ella, to have lost her first confidence. Whatever may be wrong with Passed and The China Bowl they are hers and no-one else’s, but her short stories between 1903 and 1905 suggest that she was studying the market simply with the object of finding a style which would sell. Mademoiselle (1904) is, sadly enough, in the style of Henry Harland’s P’tit Bleu, while Mark Stafford’s Wife (1905) is a good imitation of Henry James. All this might be considered as a useful apprenticeship, and perhaps, if it had come earlier, it would have been. From time to time she thought of writing a novel, but her friends discouraged her.
Feature articles, which she also tried (The Governess in Fiction, The Country Sunday, The London Sunday, Mary Stuart in Fiction), meant, as it did for so many other women writers, ‘the descent into the valley of the shadow of the books’. This is George Gissing’s phrase for the British Museum Reading Room, though he also calls it ‘the blessed refuge of the great dome’, where hacks and scribblers could pass the day without spending money on heating, and whose peculiar atmosphere, ‘at first a cause of headache’, soon became delightful. The heroine of his New Grub Street (1891), who works there from 9.30 in the morning till dusk, with one break for a cup of tea, is ‘getting up’ French authoresses of the seventeenth century from the entries in Larousse, and Charlotte’s articles show that she was probably doing the same thing, copying bits out of Bible concordances and histories of world literature and the notebooks which she had kept since her schooldays. As Gissing makes only too plain, the Museum was (as it still is) a place of slavery. The habitués talked and laughed in a strange, muted fashion ‘as a result of long years of mirth subdued in the Reading Room’. If Charlotte was too unsystematic to make a regular feature writer, at least it meant that she was spared this fate.
What she really wanted to write about was the poetry of Emily Brontë. For Emily herself she had always felt something stronger than an attraction, more, perhaps, a religious devotion. About Haworth Parsonage and the Yorkshire moors she had heard first of all from Miss Harrison, but apart from that she had nothing to go on in the early 1900s beyond Mrs Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) and a curious book, Emily Brontë, by Mary Robinson, published in W. H. Allen’s Eminent Women series in 1883. Miss Robinson had been up to Haworth and consulted local people who knew the family. Her version of the story stressed ‘the vulgar tragedy of Branwell’s woes’ and the dual nature of Emily’s faith, touching ecstasy on the one hand and on the other ‘terrible theories of doomed incurable sin and predestined loss’ which warned her that ‘an evil streak will only beget contamination and the children of the mad must be liable to madness; the children of the depraved bent on depravity’. Whether Emily really believed anything like this or not, for Charlotte Mew these words struck home. Miss Robinson went on to discuss the source of Emily’s strength. How could a woman write anything as violent as Wuthering Heights? But informants in Haworth parish had told her that Emily, though often severe, was ‘something quite jovial, like a boy’ and ‘so genial and kind, a little masculine’. The suggestion, put forward here for the first time, that Emily Brontë’s nature was ambiguous or ambisexual, did not attract Charlotte Mew, or, if it did, it frightened her. For reasons that she would scarcely have defined to herself, she wanted to show that Emily was apart from and above sexuality altogether. ‘It is said that her genius was masculine,’ she wrote, ‘but surely it was merely spiritual, strangely and exquisitely severed from embodiment and freed from any accident of sex.’ Charlotte wanted to see in Emily a reconciliation of opposites. The parsonage daughter who baked the bread and worked ‘in the narrow channels prescribed for her by dreary circumstances’ was also one of Nature’s outcasts, a noble spirit who ‘lived long enough to lift such a cry for liberty as few women have ever lifted’. In this passionately admiring piece Charlotte scarcely even tries to disentangle her own feelings from her subject. Death, she says, was not a terror for Emily, ‘this girl who mused habitually upon facts and mys
teries more terrible. It was not a problem, because it was the end of problems.’ In this interpretation, death meant rest, and the peaceful involuntary resolution of all the abnormalities and discordant elements which had tormented her in life. And Charlotte gives way to the temptation of misquoting the last sentence of Wuthering Heights, ‘“There can be” – it is her final word – “no unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.’”
Her essay, she hoped, would stand as an introduction to the poems. More than fifty years after Emily’s death, there was still no complete edition. Collecting and arranging that would make the headache-inducing visits to the Reading Room worthwhile. Who would publish it? John Lane, who had treated Ella so ignobly, was obviously impossible, but Charlotte thought of Lane’s old partner, Elkin Mathews. Mathews had been ousted by Lane and shoved back into the antiquarian book business, but he was still in publishing on his own account, and he specialized in poetry. He was an approachable man, fussy, but mild and considerate. She had no luck, however. Mathews, although he had only kept on a small business, had not lost his touch, and he must have known, though Charlotte did not, that there were two editions of Emily Brontë’s poems in the offing; one was from Heinemann with an introduction by Arthur Symons, the other a Complete Works from Hodder, edited by the all-purpose journalist Clement Shorter, with the poems as Volume I. Charlotte had chosen the right subject – or rather it had chosen her, since she loved Emily, as she says, ‘with something of her own intensity’ – but several months too late. It seems doubtful, in any case, whether Charlotte had the patience or the temperament to make a good editor, and her wild essay on ‘the passionate child of storm and cloud’ was not quite the sort of thing to appeal to Elkin Mathews.
There was always Temple Bar, which printed it in August 1904. Charlotte had, at least, the comfort of being the magazine’s regular contributor. Between 1899 and 1905 it had taken twelve of her pieces, almost all, in fact, that she had managed to write. But in 1905 Temple Bar quietly folded. It ceased publication in December, tried flounderingly to revive itself with a new series in 1906, and then collapsed for ever.
There were plenty of magazines and weeklies left on the market, more, indeed, than ever, and much more attractive ones, but Charlotte hadn’t the resilience of ten years back. The Temple Bar contributors scattered, and her friend Mrs Clement Parsons gave up journalism altogether. During the next three years Charlotte seems to have written hardly anything, or, at least, had hardly anything accepted. She possessed two large trunks which nobody, not even Anne, was allowed to look into. Possibly they were full of unread or rejected manuscripts; no-one could say.
For any kind of break from their routine the two girls relied on their friends: the Chicks, who had a house at Branscombe in Devonshire, and the Brownes, who now lived in a largeish dull house called ‘Anglefield’ at Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire. Here Mrs Browne, Maggie’s mother, talked of nothing but the price of vegetables and the difficulty of getting servants, and her father about nothing but marine biology. Maggie had become set in her ways, and it was not likely she would get married now.
1909 brought a distinct improvement. Anne had been able, with the small extra income left her by Aunt Mary Kendall, to rent a studio of her own – 6 Hogarth Studios, 64 Charlotte Street, off Fitzroy Street in Soho. This was a true artists’ quarter, and both Anne and Charlotte breathed freer air. You couldn’t cook there, but you could ask friends in and boil a kettle. For the first time Anne had one of her flower paintings accepted by the Royal Academy. Charlotte, for her part, wrote a poem, the first she had produced since her twenties. She sent it to The Nation, which was then a sixpenny radical weekly under the editorship of H. W. Massingham. Massingham accepted it.
The poem, Requiescat, is an elegy for a dead woman,
At the road’s end your strip of blue
Beyond that line of naked trees –
Strange that we should remember you
As if you would remember these!
which ends with an elegant variation:
Beyond the line of naked trees
At the road’s end, your stretch of blue –
Strange if you should remember these
As we, ah! God! remember you!
What is striking is the professional neatness and ease of this. Nothing could be more different from the intensely-felt but often ragged Quiet House, Rooms and Ken. Charlotte herself did not put her poem very high and when Ella D’Arcy wrote to her about it, had mixed feelings. ‘Looking through some of Ella’s old letters,’ she wrote in 1914, ‘I find she wrote to me 3 about the Requiescat … she had seen it in The Nation and wrote at first ironically – Thanking me for sending it to her (very likely! as she’d always spit on everything I’d done –!) and adding “it goes into my private anthology”. And in the next, “But you are a poet which I did not know and I beg you very earnestly – not to neglect this finest of all gifts. The poem was a sight realer and more beautiful than any by the Brontë sisters whose poetical genius you think so much of – go on producing.’” Ella, idling at a café table with her letters and the English papers, had insulted Emily Brontë, whom she thought much inferior to Shelley and Rimbaud, and yet Charlotte felt the warmth of encouragement. But, most characteristically, she did not write another poem for three years.
That summer, as soon as the Academy’s summer show was over, she and Anne were to go to Brittany for two weeks. Charlotte had managed to get to France two or three times with Edith Oliver – once they went as far as Aix – and her French was now fluent. But she had never, since 1901, been away with Anne. This, as always, depended not only on Anna Maria but on the whims of the tough old parrot. Wek and Mrs Mew, close as they were to each other, often refused to be looked after by the same attendant. But in July some sort of compromise had been reached. Then Anne, who was never very strong, caught cold, and Elsie O’Keefe took her place.
Charlotte would rather have gone with Edith Oliver, since Elsie, particularly since she’d got used to the moral support of a husband, was a faint-hearted traveller and easily ‘gave way’. But it was understood that Charlotte was the man of the party. At Quimper Elsie, upset by the crossing and the queer foreign food, had to be left guarding the luggage while Charlotte braved Madame at the Hôtel Lion d’Or and tried to get the cheapest rooms possible. But it was, of course, very good of Elsie to come at all, since by now she had two children, who had to be left with their nurse.
Ancient chapels, Breton costume, stone Calvaries, seaweed burners, clattering sabots, quaint processions, the Benediction of the Sea – more typical lady tourist’s letters couldn’t be imagined, as though Charlotte had sat down deliberately to write them as Miss Lotti. She adds that the way to see Brittany is off the beaten track, and resents the idea that ‘the old faith is dying out’. This is no longer the tough-romantic journalist of Notes in a Brittany Convent, and certainly not the restless, excited woman in a ‘queer uncertain mind’ who prowled round the streets of Paris. Two English ladies, no longer young, with their guide-books in their hands, they went to Audierne and walked over the rocks to Lauderneau, which looked, Charlotte thought, like a penal settlement. They just got back to Le Quendé in time for a cup of tea. ‘A gentleman’ at the hotel had recommended this outing and she now decided that all personal recommendations on holiday were useless and that she herself would never make any. Back at Audierne there was a plague of children and beggars, complained of by all the lady visitors. A dozen of the boys buried Charlotte’s umbrella in the sand, and it was a piece of luck that the woman at the semaphore station on the beach had noticed what was happening and had marked the spot.
This is the first we hear of Charlotte’s horn-handled umbrella, which was said to be almost as tall as she was herself, and was carried defiantly at her side as a defence (possibly an attack) against the rest of the world. Even when she and Elsie had to get a lift from a courier’s cart, riding on the roof with the luggage, she carried her umbrella at the familiar angle. It was,
needless to say, part of her equipment as Miss Lotti.
In the process of getting as much value as possible out of their special French Railway tickets, she and Elsie went out from Dinan to the Crozon peninsula. They were lucky in being able to see the Chapelle de Rocamadour, which was burned down less than a year later; after a good blow in the sea air, they stayed the night at Camaret-sur-Mer, or, as Charlotte spelled it, Cameret.
PÉRI EN MER
(Cameret)
One day the friends who stand about my bed
Will slowly turn from it to speak of me
Indulgently, as of the newly dead,
Not knowing how I perished by the sea,
That night in summer when the gulls topped white
The crowded masts cut black against a sky
Of fading rose – where suddenly the light
Of Youth went out, and I, no longer I,
Climbed home, the homeless ghost I was to be.
Yet as I passed, they sped me up the heights –
Old seamen round the door of the Abri
De la Tempête. Even on quiet nights
So may some ship go down with all her lights
Beyond the sight of watchers on the quay!
Charlotte never reprinted this sonnet, perhaps because of the frightful French/English rhyme be/abri/quay (she used these quite often, however). But the subject is simple enough, and universal – in November, when she got back from her holiday, she would be forty. When she wasn’t ill or depressed, she still looked much younger than her real age. Still, she would be forty. After a brilliant start, she knew she had failed to meet her friends’ expectations. Her nature stood in fear of itself, and when she had given way to it she had twice been painfully rejected. In front of her lay the Quiet House, and a money situation which was getting no easier. Her favourite image of the ship with all her riding lights turns, in the last lines, into a shipwreck without trace. Like Emily Dickinson, she felt her life closing before its close.
Charlotte Mew Page 10