Charlotte Mew

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  It was as ‘Aunty Mew’ that Alida first got to know her, after the first mistrust and suspicion were over. Charlotte had two cousins living in London, Ethel Louisa, an art teacher at Notting Hill High School, and Florence Ellen, but neither of them had married and there was no younger generation, so that the relationship with a grown-up niece was something quite new. Alida, of course, made nothing of the difference of age. When she gave her friendship (or, it must be said, her dislike) she put her whole heart into it.

  In her room in Red Lion Square Alida spent 7s. 6d. a week for rent, 2s. for gas and had £1 left to cover everything else, but she asked Charlotte to come and see her whenever she liked. Every week’s bills were a crisis (‘it doesn’t matter at all’, she wrote to Monro, ‘if you haven’t any money’) but Alida was not in the least ashamed of this. It was studio life, but without any of the gentilities of the Hogarth Studios, where a cake and flowers were provided just as Charlotte had once provided them for Ella D’Arcy. Alida simply threw a length of orange sacking, Ballets Russes style, over the coal-box, sat down, offered a cigarette, and talked into the small hours. In return, she was asked to 9 Gordon Street, where even Sappho had never been invited. The lodgers, however, were still never mentioned, and it was years before Alida knew they existed. She was shown Henry Kendall’s prize picture – the city of shining towers – and the portrait of Anna Maria as a young girl. The old lady herself, ‘Ma’, was a frightening sight – withered like a dried specimen, with little claw-like hands. Alida was also presented – there is no other word for it – to Wek, under his everyday name of Willie (he was William Edward Kendall). Alida, who later became a successful dog-breeder, had no fear of any kind of bird or animal, and the hateful old parrot recognized his match.

  Both at Gordon Street and Fitzroy Street Alida had the chance to get to know Anne. There seemed to be more than three years between the two sisters, and Anne was always ready for company, and ‘much less weighed down by the sorrows of their lives’. The responsibility was always Charlotte’s. A sort of loving conspiracy grew up between Alida and Anne to make Charlotte a little less diffident and farouche and to get her to show them more of what they felt sure she must have written. In her room she still kept the two mysterious trunks, apparently full of papers; sometimes she would take out one or two and roll them up into spills, either for her cigarettes or to give them to Wek to chew to pieces. This was done casually, with the remark that she couldn’t think what else to do with her manuscripts. Then Alida and Anne drew together a little, aware that she might be laughing at them.

  Alida’s memoir of Charlotte Mew shows that some things were kept from her, others altered, and a few suppressed. She never knew about Freda, for example, or indeed that there was madness in the family. Fred Mew was presented as the villain of the piece, ‘a man who took his responsibilities very lightly’ and ‘died, leaving nothing, having spent all his available capital on living’. Something was said about May Sinclair, but Alida got the misleading impression that there had been ‘a very complete friendship, until something she heard about Miss Sinclair destroyed it forever’. She was also told about a lawyer who had made away with a sum of money left to Charlotte by an aunt, ‘destroying her faith in Man completely’. This lawyer, if he ever existed, left no traces, but it was some kind of explanation of Charlotte’s deep distrust of men, including, as it turned out, Harold Monro himself. As to the mystery of the manuscripts, it remains unsolved to this day. Under the terms of Charlotte’s will, Alida was allowed to select one of the two trunks for her own, but ‘without the contents’.

  Charlotte did not fall physically in love with Alida Klementaski. She never fell in love with another woman after May Sinclair. She was most scrupulous, too, in her treatment of those who were attracted to her. One young girl cared for her so passionately that both the poetry and Charlotte Mew herself became an obsession. The girl, the daughter of Mrs Clement Parsons, was tubercular. During what proved to be her last illness she lay there trying to recite to the nurse ‘in her own trembling, weak, ill voice’ from Pêcheresse. Charlotte was a friend to this girl and helped her, gently and tactfully. Love, for her, was never an excuse for acquisition.

  But, as she had written herself, there are different ways of love. It was something of a miracle that Alida, so young and eager, so overworked and single-hearted, should bother about her at all. Most of the mystery Charlotte created at the Bookshop, through concealment or half-truths, was to preserve for Alida the image of ‘Aunty Mew’, a priceless Aunty, too, who ‘never went on a visit anywhere without coming back with a riotous account of what had taken place’. The two of them began to share one all-important interest, that is, the smaller troubles of life. Wek, for example, had begun to have queer turns. On the other hand old Mrs Monro, Harold’s thoroughly disapproving old mother, had been conveying insulting messages to Alida, asking her why she was not using the new ‘patriotic’ sevenpenny margarine, which Alida thought wasn’t fit to grease the boots with. Next, Alida bought for thirty shillings a West Highland terrier which she had seen advertised in Exchange and Mart. But how would it behave in the Bookshop, and what would Harold, who was always a cat-lover, say? Red Lion Square and the shop itself were in easy walking distance, and Charlotte, who had been bound for so long by formal engagements, began to ‘drop in’. That was quite a new pleasure for her, taking her back to the old Yellow Book days. Alida also dropped in at Gordon Street, and yet at times she felt in awe and half-hypnotized by the strangeness of Charlotte Mew. She described Charlotte standing with one tiny foot on the fender, and one hand on the mantelpiece, talking and twisting the ring on her little finger ‘in a fascinating manner’, or reading a new poem, always with a furious toss of her head at the end, as though to dismiss it.

  If Charlotte had given the least hint of her inner nature, Alida unquestionably would have been as bewildered as Mrs Dawson Scott. In 1916 – to illustrate this – she went to supper in Ebury Street with a South African girl whom she had known when they were suffragettes together. They had been on the same pitch in the East End, selling Votes for Women, and what with one reminiscence and another they talked so late that Alida missed the last 19 bus and had to ask if she might stay. During the night the girl walked into her room naked and Alida was ‘absolutely terrified’, as she wrote to Harold, ‘and nearly went off my head … I said “go and get a dressing gown” – thinking that once she’d gone I’d lock the door and pretend to be asleep – but she said in a curious voice, “No, it’s too much fag.”’ On this occasion Alida felt like going into a convent with Harold’s cat, Pinknose.

  There were limits, then, to what Alida, even though she had joined the ‘ranks of the emancipated’, could possibly be asked to accept. Charlotte knew this as well as Harold did, and both, in their different ways, kept silence. Alida saw clearly enough that Charlotte was ‘two people’ – split between her strict moral code which made her (or so Alida thought) ‘absolutely cut out from her friendship anyone on whom the breath of scandal blew’, and an inner self which had written Fête and Madeleine and understood very well what it was like to struggle ‘in the face of a great and overwhelming emotion’. But deeper than this Alida could not be expected to go, and she thought of Aunty Mew’s contradictions with a tender, amused affection. She used to quote from Fame the phrase ‘our tossed beds’, and comment that she was sure Charlotte had no idea how a bed got tossed. And yet she had responded at once to the cri de coeur of The Farmer’s Bride.

  The Bookshop’s idea, when Alida had first written to Charlotte, had been to ask whether she had enough poems to make up a collection, and, rather doubtfully, Charlotte produced seventeen in all. Monro read them, and was prepared to go ahead. But by now it was the winter of 1915, and he was in difficulties of all kinds. The best solution, he believed, would be to bring them out as a Chapbook – that is, a book bound in rough paper, with a cover design commissioned from one of the Bookshop’s artists. Unfortunately, Charlotte was up in arms at once. She wan
ted her poems brought out, if at all, in a properly bound volume. ‘This year’, she wrote to him, ‘I have been taken up with other things – but if you hadn’t asked to see them a few weeks since, I should have done something about a volume next year.’ Whatever she meant by this, she was troubled by his offering no money down, only royalties on any copies sold. This suggests that she knew nothing, or very little, about the usual arrangements for publishing poetry. Both Elkin Mathews and Grant Richards expected a contribution from the author of about £15. (Edward Thomas put it at £10, while Ezra Pound (according to his own account) had been asked by Elkin Mathews in 1909, ‘Ah, eh, do you care to contribute to the cost of publishing?’ and had replied that he thought he had a few shillings on him, if that was any use.) Harold Monro never asked his authors for any payment, only hoped not to lose too much himself. Matters were at a standstill when May Sinclair, still anxious to be of use, wrote (27 December 1915) advising Charlotte, from her thirty years’ experience as a writer, to close with the offer, ‘(1) because it’s a chance; (2) the poor chap can’t afford to print a regular conventional book of poems. And Harold Monro is a benefactor of poets, and so honest and sincere, and cares so awfully for what he does care for, that he deserves encouragement. (3) Because the Chapbooks really are selling as the regulation books are not.’ Monro, May pointed out, had sold 260 copies of Richard Aldington’s Images, which had been printed as a Chapbook, during one day, and Charlotte had more ‘human appeal’ than Aldington.

  Monro, who might have been pleased by May’s letter, if he had ever seen it, had sunk into one of his occasional fits of gloom, which resembled a Scotch mist. The truth was that he didn’t feel able to cope with Charlotte, while she, in response, was at her difficult worst. If he had to deal with a woman poet, Monro much preferred, for example, the handsome, forthright Anna Wickham, who could drink level with him and understand, what was more, why he drank himself. He admired Charlotte’s poetry and respected her sensitivity, but felt he could have managed better without it. Alida, distressed, tried to explain this away by saying that Charlotte, ‘like many people of character and genius, was either greatly liked or greatly disliked. She had her detractors, but there were many who loved and valued her dearly.’

  There were difficulties from the start. Monro sent out the poems for an estimate, and closed with a small firm in Clerkenwell. Some of the galley proofs had already been run off when the printer’s young son arrived, an embarrassed messenger, to say that their compositor, who was a Methodist, could not possibly set up Madeleine in Church because he thought it blasphemous. Why not another compositor? They only employed one. Charlotte was reminded of the editor who had refused Ken. It seems not to have occurred to anyone that the little firm might be afraid of legal action, which then lay against the printer as well as the writer and publisher, although Madeleine was scarcely, in legal terms, ‘so scurrilous and offensive as to pass the limit of decent controversy and to outrage any Christian feeling’. In any case, they regretted that they must give up the commission, and Monro had to go to a large and better known firm, the Westminster Press. Fortunately Gerard Meynell, Alice Meynell’s nephew, worked at the press, and through him the whole Meynell family became interested in The Farmer’s Bride.

  In February Monro was able to send Charlotte the galley proofs. The final stages were going to be troublesome, because she insisted on having the very long lines in some of her verses printed without any turn-over, if necessary using the full width of the page. Printers need regular margins, but it was hard to persuade her of this. Monro, however, understood that she was thinking of the text as something to be read aloud – a ‘printed score’, as he called it himself, and therefore did his best, settling for an awkward format, almost square, (6½ × 8 inches), which he privately considered very ugly. For the cover, he had been thinking, he said, of a dull green (it was then called Georgian cooking-apple green) and a design by his best-known artist, Lovat Fraser. He did not like to say that it was so difficult to get paper in wartime that he was using some green paper he had bought already. But Charlotte objected to both. She wanted a dark grey cover, and a design by James Guthrie of the Pear Tree Press. Here she may have been well-advised, because Lovat Fraser, though a brilliant decorator, was not an illustrator. The line-drawing which he produced of a thatched cottage with a blank wall and an improbably small window was a very elegant design, but it suggests that he hadn’t bothered to read the book.

  Monro was used to protesting writers. His position as publisher of the Georgian Poetry series put him in the front line, for everyone who was excluded felt personally insulted. The amount of abuse he put up with, even in the long history of poets and their publishers, is quite astonishing. He was accused, for example, of being domineering (one poet referred to him as ‘His Lordship’), and of picking and choosing, whereas all should be equal in the republic of literature. Some reminded him that their poems had taken several years to write, and that although his time mightn’t be precious, theirs was; or declared that out of 500 verses sent in, one, on the law of averages, must be good. Others lectured him on his religious duties, or reproved him with letting his fellow-creatures starve. Monro, unlike Henry Harland of old, had not much art of persuasion, but he succeeded in getting Charlotte to agree, rather grudgingly, to the cover for her book. At this point he discovered that rising costs and the wartime paper shortage were threatening to shipwreck him altogether. He wrote, therefore (March 4, 1916), to say that he would have to defer publication for a while.

  But Charlotte, even if she had believed (and perhaps still believed) that no-one would want to read her poems, was a writer on the verge of seeing her first book in print, and what was more she had never applied to the publisher – he had made the suggestion himself. She replied stiffly that she knew it wasn’t a time to care about personal affairs, but it was just because the future was so uncertain that she wanted The Farmer’s Bride to come out. She only wished she could pay for publication herself, but, she added confusingly, ‘friends who not long ago would have taken a personal interest in it being no longer alive and others – under the present chaotic conditions – wishing me anyhow to get it out’, she felt she must hold Mr Monro to his undertaking. Monro, who was kind rather than weak, capitulated, although he pointed out that both his cashier and his traveller would be called up in six weeks’ time and because the age limit had just been raised he would soon have to go himself. He agreed to 500 copies, then somehow managed to find enough paper for 1000 – this was a long run for the Bookshop, which often printed 250 for a first edition. Charlotte thanked him, though her satisfaction, she said, was ‘clouded by its being published reluctantly’.

  The dedication of her book gives a hint of her feelings about it, which were running much deeper than simply the indignation of a tiresome lady writer. It reads ‘To ——. He asked life of thee; and thou gavest him a long life; even for ever and ever.’ This inscription from Psalm 21 was on her great-grandmother Kendall’s grave in Kensal Green Cemetery. The editor of Charlotte’s Collected Poems and Prose, Val Warner, has suggested, very likely correctly, that ‘To ——’ means ‘To Henry’, to the memory of the poor mad dead brother whom she did not care to mention by name. Just at the time, then, when she was making new friends at the Bookshop, Charlotte was turning back more intensely to her family and its past. As to the dedication itself, there was a kind of fascination for all the Mews in the West London graveyard where old Henry Kendall, now buried there, had been cheated over his designs for the mortuary chapel. Edward Herne Kendall, Charlotte’s strange uncle, who was now in his seventies, had left Brighton and had come to live in Kensal Town, almost next door to the green expanses of the cemetery; he stayed within a few streets of it, as though obsessed, until his death. Charlotte’s blank dedication, then, which must have puzzled Alida, was in memory of someone in Charlotte’s life whose name Alida never heard, and whose sad existence was carefully kept from her.

  But The Farmer’s Bride, at least, was out
, and in May 1916 it was on the table in the Bookshop kept for new publications, along with Robert Graves’s Over the Brazier (his first collection, sent from Béthune on his way to the reserve trenches), a special limited edition of eight new poems by Yeats, a Frances Cornford Chapbook (which included ‘Oh fat white woman whom nobody loves’) and Georgian Poetry III, which had been published the previous November. It was twenty-two years since Charlotte had first attracted attention in The Yellow Book, and now, once again, she might feel herself in good company.

  Her first critic – according to Charlotte herself – was her household help, Jane Elnswick, who had come back to Gordon Street for the duration. Jane attended a Methodist chapel, and was not sure whether to be proud or ashamed of an employer who had wasted so much time in writing verses. Other reviews were scarce. Evelyn Sharp saw to it that there was a piece in The Nation, and May Sinclair sprang into action, recommending the book, she said, to every editor she knew, ‘but it is very difficult to get poetry reviewed at present – unless it is written from the trenches’. This was true enough. Georgian Poetry II, in which Marsh printed the dead Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier, was another runaway success, selling nineteen thousand copies. It was difficult even to keep two file copies in stock for the shop’s records. Alida kept finding that someone had bought them while her back was turned.