and as the radiant and vehement life rose in them like a tide, their gravity and shyness and severity passed from them; here and there hair was loosened; combs were shed and nobody stopped to gather them; for frenzy seized on the young men as their arms pressed on the girls’ shoulders, urging the pace faster and faster … so divine was the madness of their running, so inspired the whirling of the wheel … so wise and powerful was the London Polytechnic.
But the central figure, a thirty-bob-a-weeker (a clerk, this time, in an Oxford Street store) is doomed by his own decency to act out the wrong pattern, sacrificing himself to the coarse and fleshly girl who sets out to get hold of him. (Self-sacrifice was always, in May Sinclair’s view, a solution of a sort, but a mistaken one.) It is not hard to see why the story got and kept hold of Charlotte.
In the early spring of 1913 Sappho wrote in her diary:
I went to Evelyn Underhill’s and met May Sinclair and asked her to come and see me. She agreed and I then asked Charlotte, who resisted, saying she didn’t want to meet clever people. Eventually agreed to come. May arrived first and was annoyed, as she had wanted to talk to me. However, when Charlotte came I persuaded her to read to us The Farmer’s Bride, and May was so won over that she deserted me and they went away together.
It was a curious position that Charlotte should be seduced by a novel, and May ‘won over’ by a poem. The friendship, however, found its way slowly. May, at the beginning of 1913, was very much occupied with the organization of a favourite project, the Medico-Psychological Clinic of London. Into this she had sunk £500 and a considerable amount of time, for the excellent reason that she wanted to share with others what had been of help to her. She had looked to Freud, and later to Jung, to exorcise the unhappiness of her own childhood. Once that was done, she had been able to tranquillize it into fiction. Now she wanted, with her medical colleagues, to open to the public the first clinic in England offering psycho-analysis as a treatment. In June, while she was still drumming up support and looking for clerical help, Charlotte took her summer holiday.
She went to Dieppe, apparently by herself, and also apparently on her own, she went to the circus. When she took children on this kind of outing, Charlotte enjoyed it just as they did, and just as she had when she was six – that was one of the reasons they liked going out with her. But in Dieppe that June she imagined what it must be like to be an adolescent French schoolboy, cooped up in the internat and let out for the day, with nowhere to go or to amuse himself except the fête and this same circus. If it was spring-time instead of summer, that would be the hardest time of all for him, when even the rain sounded as if it were ‘starving’. He would have to sit with his friends on the wooden benches, watching the clown, the dancing bear, and the pretty lady on horseback.
‘The good nights are not made for sleep, nor the good days
for dreaming in,
And at the end in the big circus tent we sat and shook and
stewed like sin.…’
The boy must be young enough to idealize his mother, who has told him ‘nothing is true that is not good’ and old enough to ‘stew’ at the sight of the pretty lady with the white breasts. ‘Charlotte is writing a poem about the soul of a boy of 17,’ Mrs Dawson Scott noted in her diary on September 13th. This description had to do for the time being.
When she came back from France Charlotte had at first seen a good deal of May Sinclair, who asked her to a woman writers’ dinner, and then wrote (4th July): ‘My dear Miss Mew … I do so want to see you and know you better. I was more grieved than I can say at having to let you go the other evening. I was steward at that terrible dinner, and had to leave to see that everything was in order.… But I know you have forgiven me.’ There was something dazzling about May’s ceaseless activity, which always seemed to leave her time to do more than anyone else. Two weeks later Charlotte was asked to bring her poems round, and May eagerly made copies of everything. To her mind they had ‘profound vitality’, and Charlotte mustn’t mind their lack of ‘metrical technique’. She hadn’t at all understood Charlotte’s experiments in free rhyming verse, following line by line the impulses of the speaker, like jets of blood from a wound. She simply felt that they needed tidying up. Never mind, she would show them to Ezra Pound, for May knew Pound, as she knew everybody. (She had in fact been one of the first people he marked down when he arrived in London from America five years earlier, ready to declare war on English literature.) Pound suggested the English Review, or, no, Poetry might pay better. ‘Dear Charlotte,’ May wrote, determined to drop formalities. But Charlotte still hung back.
She wanted to be on equal terms, and to repay hospitality – as Miss Lotti had been brought up to do – was difficult. May gave brilliant dinner parties and confidential tête-à-têtes at her flat in Edwardes Square, in leafy Kensington. Charlotte could manage tea at Anne’s studio, but if they asked anyone to Gordon Street it was necessary to transfer old Mrs Mew discreetly upstairs, otherwise she tended to wreck the conversation with querulous interruptions. The solution would have been to join a club where guests could be invited – the Lyceum, for example, which was specifically intended for artistic and thinking women. But Charlotte could not have afforded the subscription.
In the late summer May suddenly disappeared to North Yorkshire. She had discovered (she was a great discoverer of places) a small guest house at Reeth which was quiet and comfortable enough to write in. To Charlotte this seemed a withdrawal, almost a snub. She began to fret – how much is clear enough from a letter from May saying that she had never dreamed that ‘good-bye, good luck’ would be taken as meaning ‘good-bye for ever’. She was sorry she couldn’t ask Charlotte up to Reeth, but it was impossible, she had been immensely busy, had had to pay a long visit to Scotland, had to rush to the deathbed of a dear old friend who had sent for her, had at all costs to catch up with her writing, on which, after all, her livelihood depended. May had a certain amount of time apportioned to each book, and made a summary of exactly what was to go in each chapter. Nothing was left to chance.
‘All verse gains by being spoken, and mine particularly – I suppose because it’s rough – though my ideal is beauty,’ Charlotte told Sappho. Left behind in London, she wrote more poems than at any other time in her life, though some of them were left half way to be finished later. The ‘soul of a boy of 17’ was given the ironic title Fête. Another, The Forest Road, is almost impossible to follow; Dr Scott read it and said it was so deeply realized that he felt the author must be mad – ‘a professional opinion’, as Charlotte remarked. She knew she was tackling things which might prove too much for her, ‘as in this form I am only a beginner’.
Possibly too much for her, certainly the longest, was Madeleine in Church. A woman is kneeling in the darkness in a side chapel, before the image of a homely saint ‘with his tin-pot crown’ – because the crucified Christ seems too remote from her. She is willing to believe and willing to disbelieve, but not able to do either. Madeleine isn’t, in the late Victorian sense, a ‘magdalen’. She is a demi-mondaine who has knocked about through marriage and divorce and has (like Pinero’s Mrs Tanqueray) the capacity for good, but knows she has done harm.
… The hateful day of the divorce:
Stuart got his, hands down, of course
Crowing like twenty cocks and grinning like a horse:
But Monty took it hard. All said and done, I liked him best,
He was the first, he stands out clearer than the rest.
But Pinero had made the guilty Mrs Tanqueray repent and, very properly, sacrifice herself (otherwise it would never have been a favourite part of Evelyn Millard’s). Charlotte’s Madeleine, with greater realism, asks not for less, but for more. She is prepared to have faith in heaven, but only in terms of this earth, because she was born to live through her senses – so much so that as an adolescent she couldn’t bear even the shadows on the grass or the scent of white geraniums in the dusk, ‘or, sometimes, my own hands about me anywhere’. A
nd what is God going to do with the sensualists he created? He doesn’t even reward the pure or the faithful, who have to pay out in suffering for what they never had.
No, one cannot
see
How it shall be made up to them in some serene eternity.
If there were fifty heavens God could not give us back the child who
went or never came.
But Madeleine is largely concerned with herself. She never wanted peace, only a body that would stay young, and hers has begun to age. On the verge of loneliness, she demands justice:
There must be someone. Christ! there must,
Tell me there will be some one. Who?
If there were no one else, could it be You?
This, if it is a prayer at all, is prayer in very unflattering terms. God’s peace in any case, she considers, is a last resort. He breaks us down and reduces us to nothing before he lets us come to him. ‘I do not envy him his victories. His arms are full of broken things.’ The only way Madeleine can form some conception of the love of God is through remembering a man who never touched her all night, except for one kiss. ‘We slept with it, but face to face, the whole night through.’ This is the best her imagination can do. ‘We are what we are’ and
You can change the things for which we care,
But even You, unless You kill us, not the way.
Madeleine, like the clerk in Nunhead Cemetery, and the girl in the Quiet House, lets her life come back to her in fragments which her mind hardly wants to recognize. Some of these feel like Charlotte’s own autobiography, in particular the ‘little portress at the Convent School’ and the mother, ‘yoked to the man my father was’, free of him now, but shrivelled in old age to a sapless mask while her portrait on the wall, ‘her portrait at nineteen’, seems to mock her. But Madeleine herself is a complex creation, something very different from the prostitute in Passed, or the ‘sinner’ in Pêcheresse. We can’t tell, and neither can she, how much of her agony is the protest of someone whose ‘body is her soul’ and how much is simply the terror of growing old.
Having got to the last two verses, Charlotte could not think how to end the poem. Her nerves were bad, and not made any better by one of her many attempts to give up smoking. These efforts reduced her to tears. Without cigarettes, she said, ‘I want to die.’ Where was May? But all that autumn and winter May could only be caught on the wing. She was in London in October, on Medico-Psychological business. After the inaugural meeting she realized that her money was getting low, and with admirable efficiency shut herself up again with her cat to write four saleable short stories.
Charlotte relied very much at this point on the household at Southall. Although Sappho declared frankly that she had neither honour nor decency and let her friends see everything that was sent to her, Charlotte went on posting parcels of new poems for her to look at. She only asked not to be made to look too much of a damned fool. Then there were the children. She was teaching Christopher to repeat The Golden Vanity, and she wrote out The Pedlar and The Changeling for him. These copies, in her strong black dashing handwriting, are still in the family’s possession.
Poor Anne was busy with rush orders at the workshop and was not given an hour off even on Christmas Eve. When she got home at last she was ‘dreadfully fagged and [with] a chill from working in a freezing room’. The two sisters sat together on Christmas morning among piles of nightdress-cases, hat pins, pen-wipers and scent-bottles, tokens with an old-fashioned air which suggests they were from old school friends. Mrs Dawson Scott sent a nice antique sugar basin. Charlotte acknowledged this first of all, in case Judgement Day intervened before she thanked her for it. She had few wishes, she said, and not many needs, ‘but real china of that particular kind is a (hereditary) passion, and I suppose the chief “need” of all of us is just that generous remembrance of our real selves that you have sent me’. Christmas letters can’t be held in evidence against anyone. But what did Charlotte think of as her real self?
In the New Year May Sinclair was back in Edwardes Square. She was ‘swallowed up’, she said, in activities, but she must see Charlotte, or would Charlotte come to her?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
‘Never Confess’
MAY WAS in two minds about Fête. Once again she was doubtful about the agitated long lines and the broken short ones. The poem had passion and vision, to be sure, but it was ‘something about the form’. When Charlotte read it aloud, in her appealing boy’s voice, just on the point of breaking, it was a different thing altogether. Privately May told Sappho that it was ‘wonderfully achieved, but it absolutely needed her voice, her face, her intonation and vehemence, to make it carry. I think she’s got to find a form which will be right without these outside aids.’ But Fête must be published. Harriet Monroe’s Poetry (which had rejected everything that Charlotte sent in) was condemned. Ezra Pound, too, was disgusted with Poetry. Perhaps he would consider it himself for The Egoist, on which he was the temporary literary editor. Only, May warned, there was no money to pay the contributors, and both Pound and Richard Aldington, the acting editor, were fastidious about what they called ‘the metric’ and ‘intolerant with the implacable intolerance of youth’. Charlotte interpreted this to Sappho by telling her that they were ‘choosy young gents’. Pound, however, was a connoisseur of metamorphosis, of speaking through and being spoken through, and, what was more, he understood the broken rhythm. He made no objection to Fête. He offered to print it in The Egoist as soon as there was room in the literary section. As he was also taking Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a serial, Charlotte (as in her Yellow Book days) had for a while a place among the front runners.
But if this looked like success, what about Anne, still toiling away for six days of the week? This was the old situation, no better for being old. ‘I simply hate telling [Anne] about these verses – because she’s had no chance whatever, and has 100 times my pluck and patience – and her own very definite gift – all going to seed – and to me it’s heart-breaking – and she would be furious if she knew I was saying it – and hasn’t the least idea that I feel it acutely – so little do we people who spend our days together know each other.’
Charlotte meant more by this than the waste of a professional career. She saw the uncomplaining Anne, ‘my little sister’, cut off from the resources of her imagination. Thinking over Charlotte Brontë’s question, whether the imagination is a greater blessing or a greater curse, she came out unhesitatingly on imagination’s side, preferring to suffer (as she certainly did) with the tormented creatures who spoke for her. Her audience knew this when she sat exhausted after her readings, lost to them and to herself. With artists like Charlotte Mew it is truly not possible to tell the dancer from the dance. Whether Anne’s painting meant as much to her there is no way of telling, but Charlotte believed that it could have done, and Anne was now forty years old.
It was at this point that something in Charlotte seemed to break free, and she began to behave to May Sinclair exactly as she had done ten years before to Ella D’Arcy. She fell in love, as before, with a woman older than she was, partly from physical attraction, but partly because, in each case, she had been helped and taught. One of her most endearing characteristics was her capacity for gratitude, a kind of bewilderment that anyone should take so much trouble over ‘this dreary little person’.
The first thing was to make herself useful to May. She offered to address circulars for the Medico-Psychological Clinic (May’s niece had come to help her, but had got sick of it after sticking on seven stamps). May refused, on the grounds that she couldn’t put such a burden on any of her friends. Soon there was another opportunity. Amateur musicians next door were making life intolerable in Edwardes Square. May loved music, but preferred to choose when and where she heard it. She must move at once, preferably to Hampstead or better still to Bloomsbury, where she had heard there were no musicians. Charlotte accordingly threw herself, beyond the call of duty, into house-hunting.
May, who had a number of other friends on the job, was aghast at Charlotte’s exhaustion. ‘And all my days I shall be haunted by a vision of you, small, and too fragile by far for the hideous task, going up and down those infernal houses.’ None of the places Charlotte suggested would suit, either. The rents were all too high. But May’s relations were ‘scouring’ in all directions. They would probably find her somewhere in St John’s Wood. ‘Of course I know you were angelic enough too – perhaps – like running round to House Agents for me – but can’t you see that your time ought to be given to poems, and not to lazy friends?’
Charlotte had meant to be indispensable, instead she was an object of pity. ‘I shall simply have to bolt,’ she wrote to the Dawson Scotts, though without saying why. At first it looked difficult, since Jane Elnswick had suddenly announced she was going home to look after her mother, something that the Mews, of all people, could hardly object to. But a cleaning-woman descended ‘like Manna from the clouds’ on Gordon Street, and it was possible, after all, to go.
On the 6th of April she was in Dieppe again, at the Hôtel du Commerce, where they knew her, and gave her a small room at the top of the house, looking out over red roofs and grey tiles and clouds which seemed ready to drift in at the window. ‘It makes all the difference to me to be in the right place,’ she wrote to Edith Oliver. ‘And I should never have done Fête if I hadn’t been here last year. One realizes the place much more alone I think – it is all there – you don’t feel it through another mind which mixes up things – I wonder if Art – as they say, is rather an inhuman thing?’
She hadn’t brought any books with her, only the tea-making machine. The first morning she always spent as Miss Lotti, getting methylated spirits from somewhere or other to make the wretched thing work. In the afternoon she went down to the harbour and watched a furniture auction, in an odd state of mind. Just before she left London she had heard that two more of her ‘jingles’, Fame and Pêcheresse, had been accepted by the New Weekly. But she felt ‘in a mild state of stupor’, as though she didn’t care whether they were published or not. The next day she was at the street corner in the fishermen’s quarter, watching the old women mend the nets and go off ‘with dreadful loads of them on their bent shoulders’. Nobody noticed her, it seemed; she might just as well have been invisible. ‘I think born quay-loafers are taken for what they are.’ The ‘fisher-children’, in their black school overalls, took to her particularly well, and showed her how to chalk out the pavement for a game of pelote. She was half-way towards becoming a ‘rambling sailor’. (The Rambling Sailor was an inn-sign which had stuck in her memory. Rambling is more spirited than wandering, and more innocent than roving.)
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