Charlotte Mew

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  But The Farmer’s Bride moved slowly. By July Monro had to write to Charlotte to say that the little book was ‘going dead’. Out of his run of 1000 he had 850 remainders. Charlotte sadly apologized. This, after all, was what she had expected in the first place. She had hoped for more reviews, but she knew hardly any literary people, and even if she had she couldn’t have brought herself to ask them to write anything, ‘because I am simply not the person, though for your sake I wish I were’. Mrs Dawson Scott had not been far wrong when she said of Charlotte that ‘under the curious husk is a peculiarly sweet, humble nature’. Monro, however, never had any of his remainders destroyed, and always kept the type standing as long as possible. He still had faith in The Farmer’s Bride, he was still the man who said, ‘If it is possible to imagine a world without poetry, I for one should not wish to be an inhabitant of it.’ Those words might have been his own epitaph, if he hadn’t given instructions that after death his ashes should be scattered at the root of a young oak tree. (‘This romantic notion’, he added, ‘should on no account be taken seriously unless it proves practicable.’)

  Alida, too, refused to consider the slow sales of The Farmer’s Bride important. Time would show, she believed, that the Bookshop’s confidence was justified. In 1916 she herself needed consolation. She knew that among the young men at the front there were some that Harold missed acutely. There was ‘Jim’, who wrote to say that the larks were singing through the gunfire and that yellow flowers were growing in the trenches, and would Harold send him poetry, any poetry. There was ‘Basil’, who was killed in action. ‘I liked him awfully,’ Alida nobly wrote when the news came through. But her heart felt raw. Then in August 1916 Monro, as he had anticipated, got his call-up papers.

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  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ‘J’ai passé par là’

  MONRO, who was getting on for forty, was drafted into the Royal Garrison Artillery and sent to Shoeburyness, where he did his best to train, but at an early stage was ‘threatened’ by the colonel for not attending the educational lectures. At the end of September he was transferred as a second lieutenant to an A.A. gunsite at Newton Heath, but could only long to go back to ‘the things I was made for’. He got the impression that the men hated him, with the exception of one whom he cared for very much, and that in itself, he knew, might lead to trouble. These soldiers, after all, were human beings like himself, only it was against discipline to let them know it. Sitting in a pub, writing in desperation to Alida – ‘Dear child, what shall I do?’ – he relied almost entirely on her strength, feeling that his fellow-officers were looking at him with half-drunken contempt through the glass door. Through all these months he was haunted by an incident in his first training camp, where a sentry who was said to be ‘worried about the war’ had hanged himself. For half an hour the men had simply thought he was looking over the unfinished perimeter wall. Then they noticed the colour of his face, a white face and a blue neck. The NCO who cut him down hadn’t been able to forgive him, when there were so many trees about, for not doing it somewhere outside the camp.

  Monro was aware that his nervous complaints were absurd while across the Channel slaughter was continuing on two fronts. But he felt his only source of encouragement – though that was beyond price – was the thought of Alida opening the Bookshop every morning.

  By now Alida had taught herself book-keeping, hand-printing, proof-reading, copy-editing, lettering and stock-keeping, with the intention of managing single-handed. When the Zeppelins came over, Miss Froude, the lady assistant, retired to a special chair which was kept for her in the cellar. It was a relief when Miss Froude gave notice. After that Alida was too busy to worry much, serving and taking orders all day and delivering them, as soon as the shop closed, on a hand-barrow, which she pushed as far as the carrier’s in Goswell Road. The first series of rhyme sheets were coloured by hand, and she sat down to the job, when she could find the time, with a child’s paintbox. Here Charlotte Mew, who was always neat-handed, could help. The two of them worked together not only on the rhyme sheets, but the book-covers. The Chapbook editions of F. S. Flint’s Otherworld: Cadences, Richard Aldington’s Images and James Elroy Flecker’s The Old Ships were coloured in with variations of blue, green, red, yellow or grey. Sometimes Charlotte took a parcel back to Gordon Street and coloured them there, sometimes she sat with Alida among the dozing pets. Pinknose, Harold’s cat, had lost an eye in an incendiary raid on Milman Street (where Alida now had a couple of rooms) and no longer jumped about the shelves or knocked down the books.

  By 1917 there were army huts and a canteen in Russell Square, and the trampling and rumble of convoys through Bloomsbury grew so familiar that when there were a few hours’ quiet something seemed to be missing. Charlotte, on her round of semi-official visits, had to sort out field postcards and communications from the War Office in their agonizing variations on wounded and missing, missing believed wounded, missing believed killed. She could understand all the gradations of loss and shock, and underestimated none of them. ‘J’ai passé par là,’ she wrote, quite justifiably, to a friend.

  In November 1918 she was forty-nine, and Alida sent her a birthday present so generous that Charlotte feared her own standards of living might be getting dangerously high, and she might end by having the brokers’ men in. For her part she was worried at Alida’s worn appearance, and thought she might be better off in a boarding-house – meanwhile they could always offer her bread and milk at 9 Gordon Street.

  Alida, to be sure, was almost at the end of her strength. She had been terrified when Monro told her that he would rather desert and face a military prison or a lunatic asylum than stay with his unit. But in January he had been passed unfit for general service, and in the summer of 1919 he was back in his office. Furious with his own inadequacy, devilled by drink, and writing poetry which T. S. Eliot called ‘the dourest excruciation’, he braced himself, smiling sadly, to take up his business where he had left off.

  For Georgian Poetry IV, which the Bookshop had published in 1917, Eddie Marsh had taken more advice than for his first two volumes, and he had been persuaded (if he could find one that he approved of) to include a woman poet. Monro, who was then just on the point of leaving for training camp, had strongly recommended The Farmer’s Bride. Marsh wanted a second opinion and turned to Walter de la Mare, who gave his decision against it. He was doubtful about the farmer, and not at all happy about the poem’s metre. De la Mare had a more exact ear (in the sense that a musician has perfect pitch) than perhaps any other English poet. In his verse every pause, as well as every stress, falls into place, like a language we once knew, but have to be reminded of. But in The Farmer’s Bride (although, as she said, ‘Of course I can write smoothly if I choose’) Charlotte had followed the bewilderment of the speaker so closely that there were changes of metre once or even twice in a single line. This dismayed de la Mare, and Marsh took his word for it.

  Monro had been annoyed, and had asked Marsh what was the point of consulting him if he didn’t want his advice? Now, in 1919, the question came up once more, and again Monro spoke up urgently for The Farmer’s Bride, and again Marsh, with his own brand of mild obstinacy, took no notice. He preferred, it appeared, the work of Fredegond Shove, the wife of a lecturer in economics at King’s. The Bookshop was in arms at once. Alida denounced Mrs Shove’s ‘Cambridgeness’, her arid rooms and hard furniture. But Charlotte was perhaps fortunate. In the new post-war climate Georgian Poetry was beginning to seem old-fashioned, so that, although the new volume still sold in its thousands, it was becoming less of a privilege to appear in it.

  The Farmer’s Bride itself was selling a little better and Monro took the opportunity to write to Macmillan, New York, about an American edition. ‘During the past three months’, as he put it, ‘there has been an enormous demand for Miss Mew’s work, and we feel that you will find a go
od market.’ Macmillan replied that they didn’t want a book that had been out for several years, they would prefer something entirely new. Monro, knowing how difficult it was to get Charlotte to produce anything, suggested a new edition with some additional poems. Whether there were any of these in existence or not he did not know.

  At about the same time Alida had been seized with a new idea. She had been introduced to a man who seemed to her a little ridiculous but very important, and able to do great things. He was Sydney Cockerell, the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, who had been brought to one of the Bookshop’s poetry readings. They must send him a copy of The Farmer’s Bride, it must go by the very next post. It was as the result of this notion of Alida’s that Charlotte entered upon yet another new relationship, one she could hardly have expected. She acquired an elderly admirer.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Sydney

  ALTHOUGH she made her friends’ husbands somewhat uneasy, Charlotte usually aroused a protective instinct in men. Her letters mention ‘shaggy young gentlemen’ who helped her with her luggage, and kindly older ones who showed her the way, or gave her advice. Sydney Cockerell was in fact only two years older than Charlotte, but she impressed him from the first as someone who must be looked after.

  Cockerell was one of the six children of a Brighton coal merchant who died when he was quite young. This meant a hard start, but, as he told his biographer, Wilfrid Blunt, ‘I was protected by poverty from marriage until I was forty.’ During that time he was able to develop his two ruling passions – the arts (or rather the classification and collecting of them), and the cultivating of great men. When he became Director of the Fitzwilliam in 1908 he identified the Museum completely with himself, and heroic indeed were his efforts to tap bequests, endowments, and death-bed legacies which would enrich it in every department. He calculated that during his lifetime he had made a quarter of a million pounds for the Fitzwilliam, and about a dozen enemies. Perhaps he had rather more than that. There were some who considered him a tiresome and even sinister busybody. But his acquisitions were there for everyone to see, and his reverence for Ruskin, Morris and Hardy was genuine. He was sure of the greatness of great men. It was only that they were often incapable of managing their affairs as well as he could himself, hence he hovered around them. Genuine, however, was his kindness and his interest in the minute personal concerns of other people, some of whom were not important at all. All he asked, he said, was that they should have ‘morals of some kind, however unconventional’.

  Sydney Cockerell. Photographed in 1917, the year before he met Charlotte Mew.

  Cambridge was Cockerell’s natural habitat, from which he spun his tireless web. Every day was exactly accounted for, and, from 1886 onwards, recorded in the tiny, exquisite handwriting of his diaries. For future generations, who might be lazier than himself, he summarized every page of these diaries in the top margin. ‘I learned’, he told Blunt, ‘to answer every letter by return of post; and I learned that if two jobs had to be done, the duller one must be done first.’ But in truth, nothing that had to be done was dull for Cockerell. Anything properly arranged and completed gave him satisfaction. In the Georgian world of art and letters he had many rival arrangers, collectors, and fixers – Edmund Gosse, for example, Edward Garnett, and, of course, Eddie Marsh. But in the long term, none fixed so well as the Director of the Fitzwilliam.

  Although Cockerell, according to his own account, never kissed a woman until he was twenty-eight, and even then only when he was kissed first, he understood very well how women were to be pleased. Thoughtful attentions, letters enclosing small presents, compliments, little outings to London theatres and exhibitions, all made a woman feel singled out, although she might be disconcerted when the punctual Sydney looked at his watch and darted off to catch the 2.34 or the 4.40 back to Cambridge. Kate Cockerell, the most unselfish of wives, understood his need for innocent and ponderous flirtations. In 1916 her long-standing ill-health had been diagnosed as multiple sclerosis. Almost housebound in Cambridge, with nothing to look forward to except increasing uselessness and pain, she had to give up her own work as an illuminator and designer, and worried only about the three children and about Sydney’s well-being. Knowing that she herself was not much of an organizer, she tried to make up her mind, in a perfectly rational and cheerful way, as to which of the youngish or middle-aged ladies whom he liked to take out would be best suited to look after him when she herself was gone.

  In the July of 1918 a copy of The Farmer’s Bride arrived in Cockerell’s vast daily post, with a stiff little note from Charlotte, hardly a recommendation. No worry, however, about his reading it; he always read everything, and he fell in love immediately with The Farmer’s Bride. To Charlotte Mew’s poetry, the simplest reactions were always the best, and Sydney’s were very simple. In spite of his weight of specialist knowledge, he still laughed out loud at a comedy, and, if he was reading a poem on the tram or in the Underground, often gave way to tears, ‘blubbering’, as he put it, ‘before all and sundry’. With all his fussiness, he too could hear the cri de coeur in Charlotte Mew’s poems.

  He wrote to thank her, and Charlotte diffidently told him that the whole secret had been in Miss Klementaski’s reading. He replied that it hadn’t – the melody was in the lines themselves. But, a schoolmaster at heart (he even corrected his own wife’s letters to himself), he ventured to put forward a few improvements. In the title poem, he thought that ‘down’ and ‘brown’ ought not, ‘by the strictest standards’, to rhyme together twice, and he was particularly worried by what could possibly be meant by ‘the brown of her’. ‘I suppose her sunburnt arms and neck?’ he suggested doubtfully.

  Charlotte replied that she was grateful for his practical interest, but she was not only unwilling to, but quite incapable of altering a line. (This, incidentally, was not true – she often revised, and had accepted an alteration from Harold Monro.) Sydney retreated at once. ‘Of course you are wholly right. When I had posted my letter I realized my impertinence.’ With that he began his courtship of Charlotte Mew.

  In the summer of 1918 he already had a lady friend en titre and several others whom he admired, including Alida herself and a charming artist, Dorothy Hawksley, who often came in for supper and a game of chess. Charlotte Mew, he saw, would need a different approach. When he was asked to tea at Anne’s studio he offered to wash up, something which he had probably never done in the whole of his life. Both the sisters refused to let him try, but they were touched. The next step was to ask Charlotte to Cambridge for the week-end to see his treasures, but to this there was unexpected resistance. She flatly declined to stay ‘in Cambridge or any other strange house with strange people, for the good of my soul and body’. She and Anne were ‘happy enough’, she said, ‘if you could believe it, behind our prison bars’. This last phrase partly explains the trouble – the Mews, by the end of the war, were reduced to living in the basement rooms of 9 Gordon Street, and the whole of the rest of the Quiet House was let off. ‘Our dungeon’, as Charlotte called it, was too cramped for any visitors except Alida, and it was quite impossible now to conceal the presence of the lodgers. She was too proud – it was the old trouble – to accept a Saturday to Monday invitation without making any proper return.

  Cockerell, as Alida had hoped, busied himself with sending The Farmer’s Bride to everyone he could think of, while he waited for Charlotte to relent. He always insisted on replies, and his friends found that, on the whole, it was easier to make them at once. Wilfred Scawen Blunt, the celebrated lover, horseman and traveller, thought, as might be expected, that it was a great mistake for a woman to write from the point of view of a man. He found the situations in Charlotte’s poems puzzling and questioned their ‘sexual sincerity’. Siegfried Sassoon was captivated at once and remained her faithful reader always. A. E. Housman replied (9 September 1918) with his usual glacial severity. He liked the little book, although he complained that, like most female poets, Miss Mew
put in ornament which did not suit the speaker. The ‘short piece’, A Quoi Bon Dire, was, he thought, the best.

  Seventeen years ago you said

  Something that sounded like Good-bye;

  And everybody thinks that you are dead

  But I.

  So I, as I grow stiff and cold

  To this and that say Good-bye too;

  And everybody sees that I am old

  But you.

  And one fine morning in a sunny lane

  Some boy and girl will meet and kiss and swear

  That nobody can love their way again,

  While over there

  You will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair.

  Housman seems to have forgiven the shaky grammar of the first verse for the sake of what he so well understood himself, the outlawed emotion confined into an elegant form, and the strange dislocation of time, where the only true contact is between the living and the dead. Cockerell did not know Housman, who was then the Kennedy Professor, well enough to press him further. But he sent another copy of the book to Thomas Hardy, and this was one of the greatest kindnesses he ever did Charlotte.

  In 1916 one of the tasks of the second Mrs Hardy was to read aloud in the evenings at their Dorchester home, Max Gate, to the old great man whom she so carefully tended. It was difficult to know what he would and wouldn’t like. He couldn’t, for instance, bear Wuthering Heights, he disapproved of May Sinclair’s novels, but he took to The Farmer’s Bride, and Florence Hardy was able to write to Charlotte, telling her that the little book was on her husband’s study table, and that he was quite engrossed. Hardy was too old to be anxious to see many new people, but he did express a wish, if possible, to meet Miss Mew.